In a conversation last year, Justin Sheehy, CTO of Basho, described NoSQL as a movement, rather than a technology. This description immediately felt right; I’ve never been comfortable talking about NoSQL, which when taken literally, extends from the minimalist Berkeley DB (commercialized as Sleepycat, now owned by Oracle) to the big iron HBase, with detours into software as fundamentally different as Neo4J (a graph database) and FluidDB (which defies description).

But what does it mean to say that NoSQL is a movement rather than a technology? We certainly don’t see picketers outside Oracle’s headquarters. Justin said succinctly that NoSQL is a movement for choice in database architecture. There is no single overarching technical theme; a single technology would belie the principles of the movement.