Towards Not Re-Inventing the Wheel: Managing Data Management Tools

NoSQL databases offer powerful abstractions for querying non-relational data. However, NoSQL products generally pursue superior flexibility, customizability, scalability, and performance goals while neglecting support for generally useful data management tools. In particular, products typically ship without integrated support for management features rendered conventional by the long history of RDBMSs, such as sophisticated query processing systems, join operations, aggregate functions, and integrity constraints. The design decision forces users of NoSQL technologies to find alternative methods for providing missing tools by engaging either directly or indirectly in a suboptimal k-implementation cycle as developers re-invent new instances of the same data management tools across NoSQL products. This paper articulates the problem associated with the lax regard for data management support currently defining the class of NoSQL databases and introduces the Piper package index and management system as an exploratory solution.