CouchOne, the sponsor company of, CouchDB no longer considers itself “NoSQL” company. “For our part, we’ll let others chase the ‘NoSQ’ thing,” Mikeal Rogers wrote on the CouchOne blog. No, CouchDB isn’t adding structured query language anytime soon. It’s more a matter of semantics. Since the term was coined, various projects with very different goals have been lumped together under the NoSQL banner. We’ve been guilty of this ourselves, of course. Although the NoSQL moniker has probably helping several projects gain visibility, it’s lead to some misconceptions.
The NoSQL vs. SQL debate has always been based on straw-man arguments. Someone at the last CloudCamp Portland rightly pointed out that NoSQL would be more accurately described as “not just SQL.” For example, CERN researchers are using CouchDB for some things and MongoDB for others, but the organization hasn’t gotten rid of its Oracle database. It’s rarely an either-or decision, but unfortunately it ends up being perceived that way.
CouchOne will continue to focus on its own value proposition: “We want to fix the ‘Achilles heel of the cloud’, so that everyone has their data with them at all times regardless of Internet connectivity.”
Lazy, hackneyed journalist that I am, I’ll probably continue to use the NoSQL tag for a while. But if the term’s days are numbered, that’s probably a good thing.
Meanwhile, Adrian Cockcroft is still comparing the various non-SQL database solutions to help you determine which ones might be right for your project.
