Introduction to NoSQL • Martin Fowler • GOTO 2012
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN repeatedly recommends it as a balanced, beginner-friendly overview of SQL versus NoSQL, and some teachers assign it to students.
What it is
Martin Fowler's GOTO 2012 introduction to NoSQL databases: where they came from, their data models, how consistency thinking differs, and when to use them. He argues they won't make relational databases obsolete and introduces polyglot persistence.
Recommended by 6 HN commenters across 6 different months, 2015 to 2021.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec joeclark77 · 2016-10 · on “Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?”
First, the "Mother of all Demos" by Doug Engelbart: [LINK] This was in 1968, at a time when most people thought about computers as being machines for solving computation problems, like processing payrolls or calculating rocket trajectories. Engelbart and his students had the radical idea that computers could be used for human "knowledge worker" productivity. In one 90 minute presentation, he introduces everything from the idea of a GUI, to the mouse, to word processing, hypertext, computer graphics, and (simulated) videoconferencing. You have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the audience that has never seen this stuff before, and it'll blow you away. Something more recent: Martin F
Strong rec WoodenChair · 2017-10 · on “Ask HN: Learning NoSQL, papers and books”
As a starting point, if you have little background in NoSQL, I strongly recommend this 1 hour talk by Martin Fowler: [this video] It's slightly dated, but it still gives a strong overview of the different paradigms. The truth is what you want to learn probably differs greatly depending on the paradigm that fits your application. NoSQL databases can broadly be categorized into document-oriented, key-value store, columnar, and graph. This video will help you understand what (at least three) of those are. Then you can focus in on books/articles about the paradigm that makes the most sense for you.
Recommends alfonsodev · 2015-06 · on “Ask HN: When should i use a NoSql database”
[this video] In this video Martin Fowler have some recommendations of when to choose a relational, graph or noSql database.
Recommends joeclark77 · 2015-10 · on “Why some NoSQL DBs only let you perform transactions on a single data item”
The idea is that you won't need database-wide transactions if your data is structured into "natural aggregates" such as orders, articles, profiles, etc. In a relational database, something as simple as an "order" has components in lots of different tables -- customer, product, order, line_item, shipping_method, etc -- so you have to lock all of those tables when doing an INSERT or UPDATE. In the ideal MongoDB implementation, an "order" would be a document of its own, and all the other parts would be attributes or nested structures. So you only really need a transaction for the document itself. Other documents could be inserted/updated at the same time without creating a conflict. That's the
Recommends mrwilliamchang · 2015-12 · on “I Dreamed of a Perfect Database”
"There is as yet no absolute challenger to the relational model. When people think database, they still think SQL. But if there is a true challenger, it is in the graph model." This article is quite biased towards graph databases with regards to the SQL versus NoSQL tension. This video presents a much more balanced view of SQL versus NoSQL, in my opinion. [this video]
Recommends rolandm · 2017-10 · on “Ask HN: Learning NoSQL, papers and books”
Video from Martin Fowler about Introduction to NoSQL: [this video] Tutorial from Felix Gessert about NoSQL [LINK] and Slides [LINK]
Recommends databrecht · 2021-02 · on “Ask HN: SQL or NoSQL?”
Exactly, but it goes further than that. The mentality never made sense since the term NoSQL never made sense to start. It's amazing how many people use a term that just originated from a meeting to talk about alternative databases. How we keep using it, although it's practically impossible to say what NoSQL is. Depending on whom you ask that term means different things. This is a very good introduction to the term: [this video] Graph databases are considered 'NoSQL' yet they have relations and transactions. Schemaless is often also one of the properties give to NoSQL, but it's also a bit strange to consider that a NoSQL attribute. Some traditional databases offer schemaless options and databases
Cites node-bayarea · 2021-07 · on “The Impedance Mismatch Test: Is Your Data Layer a Complex Mess?”
"Object-Relational Impedance Mismatch"[1] is been around for decades. Martin Fowler[2] and others who are deeply technical (think Sr. architects, CTOs) use this all the time. [1] [LINK] [2] [this video]