I had a lunch meeting with my project manager yesterday. It was a thing I asked for so I could get a more detailed idea of what I would be working on my first days back. Since it’s official now he could give me those details.

But… Oh lord have mercy…someone forgot to put fresh condoms on the buzzwords and they’ve multiplied by orders of magnitude since I’ve been in this trade.

Among all the new ones I am currently learning, I commend “NoSQL” to your attention. I had not heard of such a thing until yesterday as I was digging through the documentation of a tool I will likely be using going forward. The term has been around since the late 1990s, but only since 2009 to describe a non-relational, no schema, non-tabular data store…so I am told. I’m reading about this and thinking it’s like a stream of consciousness Word document that’s copied as many servers as needed to hold it all. But they wouldn’t do that.

I can see why they’re going this way…the firehose of data that some projects have to manage now, and the need for flexibility in how the data is characterised, begins to overwhelm traditional relational database management systems. But seeing line items such as “Many NoSQL stores compromise consistency in favor of availability, partition tolerance, and speed.” and that most NoSQL stores lack transaction integrity assurance mechanisms, makes me skittish. I am still trying to understand how you get data back out of one of these. Oh…and with any assurance that it’s the same data you put into it.

Life goes on. I alluded earlier to a dear friend of mine who has this tick about warning me not to let the world know that you’re crazy. But what else is it to be earning a living in this trade, if not doing just that.