Database Hearts and Arrows
Postgres vs. MongoDB and the death of SQL?
Hello and welcome to the Cloud Database Report! I’m John Foley, a long-time tech journalist, including 18 years at InformationWeek, who then worked in strategic comms at Oracle, IBM, and MongoDB. I invite you to subscribe, share, comment, and connect with me on LinkedIn.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Here’s some data for you: Nearly 1 billion roses are expected to be imported into the U.S. for sharing with that special someone, at an average cost of $90.50 per dozen. If you take the flower industry and throw in some chocolates and candle-lit dinners, the economic boost is about $27.5 billion, according to Perplexity. You gotta love that!
It’s the price we pay for expressions of friendship and romance, although in the competitive database industry, we still have our differences. My LinkedIn feed recently has exposed a few areas where people are at odds over platforms and practices. Cupid’s arrows are hitting where it hurts.
Postgres vs. MongoDB
Case in point: There was a lively thread on one of the oldest of database debates: SQL vs. NoSQL.
It was prompted by a post by Peter Zaitsev, founder of Percona, who pointed out that Postgres (a SQL database) is growing in popularity while MongoDB (NoSQL) has been in slight decline. A graph on Zaitsev’s LinkedIn post shows the trend lines.
Percona has a foot in both camps — it supports SQL (Postgres, MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB).
Some of the commentary:
“MongoDB’s strategy prioritizes the developer experience, claiming to accelerate time-to-market (TTM) by 10x. Developers love it, but in practice, results often disappoint.”
“Schema less, SQL less world is easy at first glance. But is a big technical debt for the long term. It becomes very painful down the line.”
“Comparing MongoDB and Postgres is naive thing to do. They are for two different purposes and they are not a replacement to each other…”
“I also think MongoDB deserves more credit for eventually delivering on what they marketed -- a robust, scale-out cluster for OLTP.”
SQL’s tombstone
That’s the gist of the SQL vs. NoSQL polemic, but not the end of it.
Lekhana Reddy, founder of Storytelling by Data, caused a kerfuffle with a LinkedIn post that headlined “SQL IS DEAD!!” The influencer and tech creator included an image of a tombstone with SQL sketched into it.
What happened that caused SQL to bite the DB dust? According to Reddy, Uber has developed a natural language query tool that obviates the need for the more arcane SQL programming.
Yet, the report of SQL’s death was greatly exaggerated, by Reddy’s own admission. “SQL isn’t dead it’s evolving,” she added.
The hoax drew more than 900 comments on Reddy’s post. Some samples:
“my take: SQL WILL not die before us!”
“SQL and other programming languages are not dead until AI generates its own language and data storage.”
“AI-assisted SQL won’t replace data professionals, it will enhance their capabilities.”
A relationship in the cloud
The good vibes came a day early for SAP and Databricks. When SAP CEO Christian Klein announced the launch of SAP Business Data Cloud in partnership with Databricks, one observer responded simply:
“💙 ❤️”
Quote of the day
I will wrap up with one of my favorite literary quotes below.
“Love loves to love love.”
Do you know who wrote it? Leave a comment.