Toad World

This post serves as a starting point for a short blog series where I will show you how to talk SQL to NoSQL data stores.

Which sounds like a contradiction in itself, because most of the NoSQL stores don’t have an SQL interface at all (remember: NoSQL stands for “Not only SQL”, so this is true for most, not necessarily all NoSQL stuff).

While having no SQL interface may be quite ok or even positive from a developer’s perspective, I (with my DBA affinity) still like and prefer good old SQL, e.g. for quick checks what’s going on in the database (sorry: it’s called a “data store” when it comes to NoSQL…). Even in the NoSQL world you may want to join or compare data from different sources or move them around, from NoSQL to a standard SQL database or vice versa. In these cases, SQL comes handy as it allows you to do these things with SQL joins, INSERT commands and other well-known syntax.

A great tool that works like a translator between SQL and the correponding NoSQL data store’s API is the Toad for Cloud Databases from Quest Software (my employer, actually). You can find it here, and during the next posts I will give an overview of NoSQL and how Toad can connect SQL to NoSQL.

Part 1: Cloud databases and NoSQL data stores – what’s it about?

Part 2: Talking SQL to NoSQL – Setting up

Part 3: Talking SQL to NoSQL – Use cases and samples

Enjoy and feel free to comment!