SQL Server vs. NoSQL

Question

So I have a website that could eventually get some pretty high traffic. My DB implementation is in SQL Server 2008 at the moment. I really only have 2 tables and a few stored procs. Most of the DB could be re-designed to work without joining (although it wouldn't make sense when I can join so easily within SQL Server).

I heard that sites like Digg and Facebook use NoSQL databases for a lot of their basic data access. Is this something worth looking into, or will SQL Server not really slow me down that bad?

I use paging on my site (although this might change in the future), and I also use AJAX'd data access for most of the "live" stuff, so it doesn't really seem to be a performance hindrance at the moment, but I'm afraid it will be as the data starts expanding exponentially.

Am I going to gain a lot of performance my moving to NoSQL? Honestly, right now I don't even completely understand NoSQL, so any tips on how this will help me improve the better.

Thanks guys.

Answer 1

Actually Facebook use a relational database at its core, see SOCC Keynote Address: Building Facebook: Performance at Massive Scale. And so do many other web-scale sites, see Why does Quora use MySQL as the data store instead of NoSQLs such as Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB etc?. There is also a discussion of how to scale SQL Server to web-scale size, see How do large-scale sites and applications remain SQL-based? which is based on MySpace's architecture (more details at Scale out SQL Server by using Reliable Messaging). I'm not saying that NoSQL doesn't have its use cases, I just want to point out that there are many shades of gray between white and black.

If you're afraid that your current solution will not scale then perhaps you should look at what are the factors that prevent scalability with your current solution. Test data is cheap to produce, load the 'exponentially increased' data volume and run your test harness, see where it cracks. None of the NoSQL solutions will bring magic off-the-shelf scalability, they all require you to understand how to use them effectively and deploy them correctly. And they also require you to test with large volumes if you want to ensure success at scale. Same for traditional relational solutions.