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No to SQL? Anti-database movement gains steam

“Relational databases give you too much. They force you to twist your object data to fit a RDBMS [relational database management system],” said Jon Travis, principal engineer at Java toolmaker SpringSource, one of the 10 presenters at the NoSQL confab. NoSQL-based alternatives “just give you what you need,” Travis said. Facebook, for instance, created its Cassandra data store in-house to replace its use of MySQL. According to a presentation by Facebook engineer Avinash Lakshman, Cassandra can write 50GB of data in 0.12 milliseconds, more than 2,500 times faster than MySQL.