Why you don't need JOINs (and the RDBMS to do them)

Before I sit down and design a back-end for a project, I write the ideal API specification that would enable developers to be happy and enable them to provide all the polish and sizzle to sell the product. Then I turn the spec into a RESTful service where I don't worry about complexity nor scale. I let the developers work with it and I collect data on how it is used, so I know where the crap is; there is always crap to deal with.

This process has worked out very well for me and my clients, and it is working out very well for the development community in general. We are in the SaaS phase where we produce and consume each other's services. This is nice.

Sometimes we consume two such services and then make something new. This is called a "mashup". Well, guess what? A "mashup" is equivalent to an application level JOIN. This used to be a service provided by the relational database, but now people are doing it by hand.

Better yet, people are used to it and they are kinda fine with it. This is a good thing as it enables service developers to focus on their services and let product developers focus on their product. Developers are learning to

• Optimize, cache, pre-compute back-end requests
• Write loops to efficiently cross reference code
• Avoid the angry looking DBA

There are systems, like memcached, that exist in such a way that they enable product developers to solve product problems without the need to make the DBA change anything. Once developers are empowered, they can use their own creativity and intelligence to polish the product.

We may be looking at the last decade that DBAs are ever bottlenecks. Does this mean that DBAs are obsolete? No, it is a lateral move for them as they become service programmers with the role to produce optimized services. Can they use a RDBMS for it? Sure, they can eat what-ever dog food they want.

Having been on both sides of the fence as a DBA and a product developer, I am comfortable saying that NoSQL movement is definitely going to take hold in ways that people don't expect. I think it is going to restructure the entire way corporations view IT.