MongoDB for Developers with Python Transcripts
Chapter: What is NoSQL?
Lecture: Origins of NoSQL
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The first record of what you might consider modern day NoSQL, there were some older versions much, much older
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about object databases that don't really carry on through today; but what we think of when we talk about NoSQL today
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really started back 2009 in San Francisco. So this guy Johan Oskarsson, who at the time was working at last.fm
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was getting together like a big data/ scaling databases type of meetup in San Francisco, and the idea was
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we're going to talk about open source databases, distributed databases, that is databases that are easily horizontally scalable,
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and that might not be traditionally relational. This description here on the right actually comes from Wikipedia,
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the name itself, the actual NoSQL, the word, I don't believe it's here, but it was in a previous accounting, it's not in Wikipedia,
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which if I could find the reference, I should go back and edit it, is there's another guy named Eric Evans who was attending this meeting as well
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and Johan said hey what are we going to call this meeting like we do have a name for these types of groups,
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this type of thing that we're doing, and let's try to get something short, like say a hashtag that we can use on Twitter to talk about it;
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So Eric Evans said how about #NoSQL, right, and that is the origin of the modern day term.
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And the idea was, it was meant to describe this group of people mostly running web apps with lots of data,
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with high performance implications, or requirements, getting together to talk about how can we give up
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some of the features of relational databases to enable other types of things, so maybe we'll give up atomicity, the acid properties,
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maybe we'll give up joins, maybe we'll give up transactions, things like that, and if we do that, how do we maybe structure our data differently,
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how do we structure our databases differently, to be better at basically being cluster friendly.
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Alright, so to me, this is the idea of what a NoSQL database is, it's a database that gives up some of the relational
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database features or requirements or properties, so that it is more cluster friendly, it is more friendly to scaling and sharding and things like that.