# What is NoSQL?

## A Philosophical Movement

- Freedom from the limitations and complexities of the relational model
- Freedom from the licensing fees and incompatibilities of Oracle/Sybase/IBM/Microsoft/etc.
- Freedom from the up-front design costs of schema-based data storage

## A Technical Anti-Specification

- No Structured Query Language
- No fixed schemas
- No joins (some may dispute this point)

## A New Hope

- True Horizontal Scalability
- Excellent performance with large datasets and binary data
- A safe haven for the lazy, the impatient, and the hubristic

## The Phantom Menace

- Not what everyone uses, for better or worse, 95% of the time
- No standards
- Weakened integrity assurances

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