Relational databases, the heart of storing and processing data in the enterprise for over 30 years, are no longer the only game in town. The past seven years have seen the birth —and in some cases the death—of many alternative data stores that are being used in mission-critical enterprise applications. These new data stores have been designed specifically to solve data access problems that relational database can’t handle as effectively. An example of a problem that pushes traditional relational databases to the breaking point is scale. How do you store hundreds or thousands of terabytes (TB) in a relational database? The answer reminds us of the old joke.
