We had a lively discussion at Structure 2010 about Scaling Databases in the Cloud.

You can view an archived stream of the panel discussion at the Structure website, but for now here are some of the cool things we discussed:

• Is your project appropriate for NoSQL?  Start by looking at the data model and the workload and you’ll know what works best for your needs
• NoSQL is not necessarily any better for the cloud than SQL.  That’s not a compelling reason to use it.
• Advantages of NoSQL include being designed from the ground up for parallel distributed processing and automated clustering, low latency, in memory caching and concurrency processing
• A major advantage of NoSQL databases are their ability to scale horizontally on commodity hardware
• The ability to recover transparently from hardware failure
• Developers don’t like SQL to begin with so we’re not going to have to fire them all to have them learn NoSQL solutions
• Neo4J says 70-80% of their implementation are in the enterprise and Terracotta says they’re 50-60% in the enterprise

Stay tuned for more NoSQL and Structure 2010 info.