If you’ve been following the developer community in 2010, you’ve probably heard the term NoSQL mentioned thousands of times. Maybe you’ve heard it mentioned so many times you’re sick of it and might have missed what it’s all about. And that would be a bad thing, NoSQL does in fact solve some hard problems and is here to stay. Don’t worry if you’ve missed the boat last year, there are a lot of great resources on the net to get you started right away.
The trouble with NoSQL is that the term can be applied to an incredible rich set of database systems. Just as AJAX is no longer just about Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, but might also involve JSON and push, so is NoSQL not just “no SQL”. Going by the
Wikipedia definition, you’ll feel immediately lost by the sheer endless amount of links and types of NoSQL databases.
If you want to get a start in NoSQL, you might want to try with one of the most known examples, CouchDB. It is very well documented so it should be no problem to try it out. The definitive guide is freely available.
If you like to learn visually, I can’t recommend the NOSQL Tapes highly enough. They are very well produced movies on NoSQL. Explaining the theory behind some of the databases, interviews with developers and examples. I can’t embed any video right here, but the videos on graphical databases and mapreduce are some of the highlights.
Go watch them all.