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copied!<p>I recently attended the NoSQL conference in London and think I have a better idea now how to answer the original question. I also wrote a <a href="http://andrewwhitehouse.wordpress.com/2010/04/24/nosql-is-it-time-to-ditch-your-relational-database/" rel="noreferrer">blog post</a>, and there are a couple of other <a href="http://blogs.the451group.com/information_management/2010/04/21/user-perspectives-on-nosql/" rel="noreferrer">good</a> <a href="http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2010/04/20/the-guardian-nosql-eu-dont-melt-the-database/" rel="noreferrer">ones</a>.</p> <p>Key points:</p> <ul> <li>We have accumulated probably 30 years knowledge of adminstering relational databases, so shouldn't replace them without careful consideration; non-relational data stores are less mature than relational ones, and so are inherently more risky to adopt</li> <li>There are different types of non-relational data store; some are key-value stores, some are document stores, some are graph databases</li> <li>You could use a hybrid approach, e.g. a combination of RDBMS and graph data store for a social software site</li> <li>Document data stores (e.g. CouchDB and MongoDB) are probably the closest to relational databases and provide a JSON data structure with all the fields presented hierarchically which avoids having to do table joins, and (some might argue) is an improvement on the traditional object-relational mapping that most applications currently use</li> <li>Non-relational databases support replication (including master-master); relational databases support replication too but it may not be as comprehensive as the non-relational option</li> <li>Very large sites such as Twitter, Digg and Facebook use Cassandra, which is built from the ground up to support clustering</li> <li>Relational databases are probably suitable for 90% of cases</li> </ul> <p>In summary, consensus seems to be "proceed with caution".</p>

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