Best of 2010

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2010. 80 posts.

Databases & Data
15

NoSQL vs. RDBMS: Let the flames begin

I’ve been getting solidly flamed recently, as have my former coworkers at Digg, my friends at Twitter, etc. about our adoption and promotion of various NoSQL storage systems. It seems that some DBAs are very, very upset that us internet kids are considering abandoning SQL’s ship. I’m not here to throw out a bunch of…

16

12 Months with MongoDB

As previously blogged , Wordnik is a heavy user of 10gen’s MongoDB . One year ago today we started the investigation to find an alternative to MySQL to store, find, and retrieve our corpus data. After months of experimentation in the non-relational landscape (and running a scary number of nightly builds), we settled…

28

In defence of SQL

SQL is ugly but powerful, ORM is genuinely dumb, and "NoSQL" should really be called OMADS: Obviously More Appropriate Data Stores. Start every project with an RDBMS, add specialized stores where they fit, and stop apologizing for using SQL. Forty years on, nothing beats it for ad-hoc questions about your data.