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NoSQL Distilled: A Brief Guide To The Emerging World Of Polyglot Persistence (2012)

by Pramod J. Sadalage(Favorite Author)

4.02 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0321826620 (ISBN13: 9780321826626)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Addison-Wesley Professional

review 1: Since my career as a programmer maps the historical period that lead up to the creation of NOSQL databases and the burgeoning polyglot paradigm I didn't think I would need this book. But it did help position nosql as a solution set of concerns that anyone developing for the web today has - how to architect, scale and manage for change in a world of global deployments and endpoints with varying capabilities. Its good manager primer on the topic - now on to more hefty reading, or just coding.
review 2: The world of NoSQL is still very young and very fresh. Most books about relational databases tend to be about a specific one, like Oracle or MySQL, and tend to deal with specific issues, such as performance or scalability but very few developers are using NoSQL s... moreolutions on such a scale as to warrant those kinds of treatments. The questions developers have about NoSQL don't call for books like "High Performance MongoDB: Optimization, Backups, and Replication", but that exact book exists for MySQL.Most developers are in the dipping-a-toe-in phase of NoSQL adoption. And the questions most developers have are:1) What the heck is NoSQL?2) What are the different kinds of NoSQL databases?3) What does it look like to use them?4) Which NoSQL database should I use?That last question is the one that most people get hung up on. NoSQL is an umbrella term that covers a lot of different technology, and the individual elements under this umbrella can differ greatly. A data model that lends itself well to a particular NoSQL database might be completely wrong on another NoSQL database.NoSQL Distilled aims to be a very short and concise introduction to this umbrella term, with a particular focus on answering this last question. Rather than simply being a series of chapters, each one covering a different NoSQL database, Distilled tries to pull out the elements common to these technologies and focus on the underlying principles. In a way, it's like Fowler's other books, in that the first half is general principles, and the second half is specifics that go deeper on those principles. We don't really see any actual NoSQL databases until about the halfway point, after Distilled has explained the various types of clustering strategies, performance concerns, and patterns of NoSQL databases in general.I liked this approach very much. It allows the reader to focus on what actually matters about NoSQL databases, such as why they exist, what they're good at, what they're bad at, and what principles they follow, before getting into specifics like syntax or deployment. Martin Fowler has always been one of my favorite tech authors, and though his co-author is new to me, I definitely felt like I was reading a typical Fowler book. Occasionally dry but still dense with information, covered competently and explained well. I also appreciated the complete lack of marketing/hype, which is present in most other NoSQL books (often written by people affiliated with the projects). NoSQL distilled is clear in that it says you should probably use a relational database still, and only use NoSQL if you can prove it has a particular benefit for you.NoSQL distilled does not go deep into anything. If you're experienced with various NoSQL databases, this book will be largely useless to you. But if you've lived your life in a relational world and you're curious about what kind of benefits you could get by using a document database or a key-value store or a graph database, NoSQL distilled will be very enlightening. It does an admirable job of answering the "when to use/when not to use" question, though I do feel like it could have gone into more detail in answering those questions. less

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