We wouldn’t care as much about NoSQL if it wasn’t called NoSQL. Even the word itself is triggering existential crises among some very smart, seasoned people.

But why?

…because the term NoSQL encapsulates just about every phase of database innovation in the last decade.

The inspiration for this post came from reading Chip and Dan Heath’s book called Made to Stick. Their theories, plus much buzzing from the anti-NoSQL camp about how “this is just a phase like XML DB” and “you obviously aren’t smart enough to understand the RDBMS”, has given me some fresh thoughts on why NoSQL is such a controversial thing.

According to the Heath brothers, a sticky idea is one that’s: simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and a story. Now… the connection between psychology, computers, and social science can get pretty vague for someone untrained in two of those fields (me), but I hope this article will at least spark some interesting discussion.

So with all that in mind, let’s examine why NoSQL is such an awesome idea — and why it scares us.

(if you want a data platform that’s scalable, real-time, AND has a query language, check out Drawn to Scale)

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