::::MongoDB or MySQL? Why not both?::::

<div class=&quot;custm_img_blk&quot;><img src=&quot;http://www.techgig.com/files/photo_1338000935_temp.jpg&quot; border=&quot;0&quot; align=&quot;left&quot; /></div><p style=&quot;margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline&quot;>Someone please tell me we&rsquo;ve gotten past the either-or debate over NoSQL and relational databases.</p><p style=&quot;margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline&quot;>While NoSQL databases are foundational technologies for web startups &mdash; with most of these young companies opting for<span style=&quot;background-color: transparent&quot;>MongoDB,</span>&nbsp;Cassandra,&nbsp;<span style=&quot;background-color: transparent&quot;>CouchDB</span>&nbsp;or something else to fulfill their database needs &mdash; they might be better served going a hybrid route instead. There&rsquo;s always room for a good, old-fashioned relational database &mdash; especially if they want to conduct and store financial transactions.</p><p style=&quot;margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline&quot;>Just ask Mark O&rsquo;Neill, CTO of&nbsp;<span style=&quot;background-color: transparent&quot;>Thrillist,</span>&nbsp;a New York City-based media company that fields e-commerce and consumer recommendation services. Thrillist uses the NoSQL&nbsp;<span style=&quot;background-color: transparent&quot;>MongoDB</span>&nbsp;to track and store tons of data about user interactions, but it&rsquo;s MySQL all the way&nbsp;when it comes to bread-and-butter transactions and financial data that runs the company.</p><p style=&quot;margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline&quot;>There&rsquo;s a reason for that, O&rsquo;Neill said. As great as MongoDB (or Cassandra or CouchDB or insert your favorite NoSQL entry here) may be, they&rsquo;re still relatively immature compared to their SQL forebears. The ancillary tools aren&rsquo;t as robust and it&rsquo;s hard to find NoSQL talent.</p><p style=&quot;margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline&quot;>&ldquo;Skillsets around NoSQL are lacking and SQL [as a language] is relatively simple to learn &mdash; writing queries in SQL &nbsp;is not so bad. With NoSQL, the tools are less robust and the barrier to entry is much higher,&rdquo; O&rsquo;Neill told me in an interview.</p><p style=&quot;margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline&quot;>Thrillist, founded in 2005, looked at several NoSQL options but went with MongoDB over the NoSQL alternatives because at the time it was more stable, had a larger community around it and better tools than the others, O&rsquo;Neill said.</p><p style=&quot;margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline&quot;>Make no mistake: MongoDB is great for handling all the critical social interactions that take place. &ldquo;For each action taken by a user, you want to know what the user&rsquo;s friends were doing and you want to pull all that data out from a single location. Say you take an action on Meet Up, it will update your user references and update all your friends. Non-relational stores are really good at that and you can afford to keep that data in multiple places &mdash; we use Mongo for that,&rdquo; O&rsquo;Neill said.</p><p style=&quot;margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline&quot;>But, for transactions? Well, &ldquo;Mongo doesn&rsquo;t really have transactions. If I write [data] in multiple places and want to check all that in at one time, Mongo can&rsquo;t do that,&rdquo; O&rsquo;Neill said. When someone buys something at Thrillist&rsquo;s Jackthreads site, the system must record their order and all the items associated with that order, or nothing works. &ldquo;It all gets written or none of it does. Mongo is not good at that,&rdquo; said O&rsquo;Neill.</p><p style=&quot;margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline&quot;>So a word to the wise web startup: NoSQL &mdash; in this case MongoDB &mdash; is great for what it does, but for your financial transactions stick with SQL.</p><p style=&quot;margin: 0px 0px 18px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline&quot;>For more discussion about the technologies &mdash; NoSQL or not &mdash; powering the web sites and mobile applications we all use, come check out GigaOM&rsquo;s&nbsp;<span style=&quot;background-color: transparent&quot;>Structure conference</span>&nbsp;next month.</p>

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