Really? Still Fighting About SQL vs. NoSQL? -- Visual Studio Magazine

Data Driverby David Ramel

Really? Still Fighting About SQL vs. NoSQL?

I was quite surprised to see a recent Slashdot post titled "SQL vs. NoSQL: Which is Better?" My first thought was: "Really? Hasn't this already been settled?" The politically correct answer to the question, of course, goes along the lines of: "Neither is better. They are separate tools. As with all tools, each addresses specific problems and should be used by programmers according to their needs ...." And so on.

I haven't combed through the 300-plus comments on the post yet, but I'm willing to bet a bunch of them pretty much say the same thing.

The post references an extensive Slashdot article by experienced programmer Jeff Cogswell, who writes: "Tech pros debate the merits of SQL vs. NoSQL. It's a fight worth examining on the programming level."

So this gets down to the nuts-and-bolts of the programming aspect, kind of a different take. He discusses using the two in Node.JS, in C# and much more. He likes MongoDB, but concludes basically with my politically correct (and I thought, by now, universally accepted) answer above, which I wrote before reading his article. He writes:

So I use both. For some projects, I use Oracle, MySQL, or SQL Server (yes, I've used all three on different projects) for clients who have large amounts of data that fit well into a tabular structure, and who will be doing queries that pull back thousands of records per query. (Think financial applications.) For software that's more oriented towards pulling individual objects (such as an online organizer tool, or an online content management system that I'm presently working on), I opt for something like MongoDB.

Now I look at the post comments and the very first one reads: "SQL and NoSQL are different, with different use cases."

Well, duh!

So why are we still debating this issue? Please take a look at the post and Cogswell's article and share what you think. Does focusing on the coding add anything to the debate? Comment here or drop me a line.

Posted by David Ramel on 08/07/2012

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