NoSQL Distilled : Book Review

I have finished reading the book titled "NoSQL Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Emerging World of Polyglot Persistence" written by  Martin Fowler and Pramod J. Sadalage  recently and thought of a writing short review. First of all it short book and you can run through the pages fast. As the title says, the book is really an introduction of No SQL databases.

It was..

The number one reason for the use of NoSQL databases is not performance and should be our use case. This means if our data model does not fit well in to the relational model, rather than twisting the data we can choose alternate data stores. This is absolutely critical if you want NoSQL to be used in most of the mid sized enterprise applications.  Also companies will start to believe that they should consider NoSQL it even if they are not Google or Amazon. 

Normally the technology books written by its creators of it will only focus on the advantages of using it. It can be quite an issue if you do not do proper research before choosing your application architecture. Since both Martin and Pramod do not belong to this category, they does a fair evaluation of various choices available to us. The section which says where to use it and where not to use is particularly impressive on that front.

Even though the book is selling you a new idea of NoSQL databases, it does not plays down the significance and importance of existing RDBMS. The book also brings light to some of the fundamental trade offs in the world of data stores like  consistency, availability and performance.

and is also..

When I was reading the book I thought that Polygot persistence is about using multiple data stores in same application depending on the use cases. But authors also seems to suggest that applications should wrap around the data stores with services ( like web services or REST). If we need to do this ideally we could only have one data store accessed by one service. Which would conflict the first statement. I am not sure about the reverence this question but I would love to have read more about using the different data store in the same application and its pros and cons.

I mean to say, 

This is a very great book if you are  looking get in to wild jungle of NoSQL databases. The authors does a great job in giving the brief introduction and making sure the basics are covered.