Some say architecture is destiny. But it seems as if the world of analytic databases is moving on many fronts in all directions with no particular destination. That, in fact, is probably a good working definition of “postmodern.”

That’s the only reasonable conclusion you can draw from the sprawling mess of a movement known as “NoSQL.” It defines itself by what it is not, which would be easy to do if all it were rebelling against were something well-defined, such as the need to use Structured Query Language (SQL) to access, query, update, and manipulate data, or the need to store and manage that data in third-normal-form relational databases.

But no.  The NoSQL movement seems to fancy itself a catchall for all things “next-generation database,” though even there it is not clear what exactly they’re rebelling against. Check out this “NoSQL” scoping definition on the movement’s principal website: “Next Generation Databases [are] non-relational, distributed, open-source...horizontally scalable... modern web-scale databases....schema-free, replication support, easy API, eventual consistency, and more.”

Whew! If that non-definition didn’t leave you gasping for breath, the unruly menagerie of “No SQL” database approaches listed on the website will completely rob you of your oxygen supply. Apparently, this movement includes an unholy host of old and new database approaches, including wide column store/ column families, document store, key value/ tuple store, eventually consistent key value store, graph databases, object databases, grid database solutions, and XML databases.