NoSQL: The Love Child of Google, Amazon and ... Lotus Notes

What with the shelf-life of software being so short, it's very easy to forget how programs that are now almost universally hated, derided, and synonymous with "large, bloated corporations" (i.e., Lotus Notes) at one time represented the state-of-the-art in software engineering.

<i>“NoSQL” is a misnomer. NoSQL databases aren’t designed to abandon SQL, the structured query language used pull information from traditional databases such as Oracle and MySQL. A better name would be “non-relational database.” NoSQL databases don’t use the neat tables of data that underpin relational databases.</i><p>Thank you. I've been beating that drum for a while. (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4566423" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4566423</a>, <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4044572" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4044572</a>, <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=899758" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=899758</a>, <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=853284" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=853284</a>)

TBH, Lotus Notes as of right now is probably not a fantastic solution to whatever problem you may have.<p>However, I think it is largely a mistake to judge software that was state of the art from 15+ years ago by today's standards.<p>In those days, most databases didn't really handle replication particularly well. Notes was the most fully-featured in that respect.<p>In addition network speeds and bandwiths were lower than they are now, so it wasn't really feasible for a global company to have everybody hit a single database instance.<p>Lotus Notes programming was simple, so if you could write a Lotus or Excel macro, you could create a database for your team. This made it popular for semi-technical end users.<p>It also pre-dates HTML, so web browsers and thin clients weren't really available.<p>Having said all that, I'd still take Notes over Sharepoint :-)

Meanwhile, non-relational databases go back at least to in '60s and predate the relational model.<p><a href="http://blog.knuthaugen.no/2010/03/a-brief-history-of-nosql.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.knuthaugen.no/2010/03/a-brief-history-of-nosql.h...</a>

Somewhat related: Damien Katz has a brilliant blog post describing his experiences rewriting the Lotus Notes formula engine, and dealing with the "bugs". <a href="http://damienkatz.net/2005/01/formula-engine-rewrite.html" rel="nofollow">http://damienkatz.net/2005/01/formula-engine-rewrite.html</a>

There's a nice Stack Overflow podcast[1] on the same subject, where Damien Katz talks a little about what he liked on Lotus Notes. I thought it was a nice episode.<p>[1] <a href="http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/podcast-59/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/podcast-59/</a>

I was a Notes programer at IBM over 10 years ago now, Notes is really misunderstood. Oddly most people think of Notes as just an email/calendaring tool and not for making useful databases for helping to collaborate/ run a business.<p>Having put the Notes programming thing behind me, looking into NOSQL had me thinking this looks familiar.<p>The notes platform at IBM was used to build out custom apps. I was a coop student employee and built them a lot of custom apps. its amazing how those custom tools can really help get stuff done.<p>You can also see why its not such a great email client (email is just another database no matter how much customization they do). I used Notes as an email client at another job and it has gotten better over the years, its still clunky.<p>lotus-script left a lot to be desired.

I worked on an OLAP based product until 3 years ago. The source data was in a lotus notes application that was updated by nearly 100 different researchers. We imported the lotus notes data into our data warehouse every night. I can't tell you how many times we had problems because data had been entered in a different format. Schema-less might have it's place but I definitely wasn't seeing the benefits on that job!

Wow, I remember playing on the PLATO at U of I when I was a kid. This article calls it a "mainframe", but my perception was that it was smaller than that.<p>I'd always thought PLATO was primary an educational computing experiment. Good to know that people got other technology out of it too.

when was berkley db built? this whole nosql discussion bores me. not to mention that graph databases which is also part of that nosql talk originated in the 70s?