Do you work on a dinosaur system? Something that's antiquated, not integrated with other systems, hard to query? That sounds like most applications I've worked on.
I noticed this post recently, talking about how so many of the systems that have our private data stored in them (identity, financial, etc.), are dinosaur systems. They are silos that are built for specific purposes, against their own databases, and don't easily integrate information with other systems. The example in the article talks about the difficulty in a telecommunications firm of matching up two pieces of data from two systems.
The article goes on to say that Facebook and Google have avoided this problem with other database systems that overcome the "limitations of relational databases." Presumably this is a veiled plug for moving to a NoSQL model of some sort, that is somehow superior than the relational one.
The problems outlined in the article aren't there because of the database system. They are application silo issues, where systems can't easily query data from other sources. These same types of issues would exist with any NoSQL database if the application were not setup to query from a variety of data locations.
And in the case of running reports, things could be worse in a NoSQL system is the nodes queried were not in sync with each other in terms of data updates. That "eventual consistency" thing could really bite you in the tail if one part of your report contained data that was an hour older than data in another part.
The systems we use based on relational databases aren't dinosaurs. They're just old.
Steve Jones
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