A few weeks back I wrote about the cloud-related trend of "NoSQL," a set of operational-data technologies based on non-relational database principles. But beyond the developer crowd and smaller Web-based businesses, how much has this trend taken root in "real world" production environments? I recently spoke with Durran Jordan and Les Hill of Hashrocket, a Florida-based Web design and development group, about their use of MongoDB (which is billed as a scalable, high-performance, open source, schema-free, document-oriented database) in an application for one of their pharma customers. Hashrocket's customer had an existing SQL-based application that they were required to rebuild because the current database could not handle the load given the complexity of the schema and the amount of data that it was storing. The queries against the existing relational database were excessively complex due to a large number of tables, and caused the database to slow down to a crawl, effectively "breaking" the application. After experimenting with a variety of optimization methods, the team looked to NoSQL options to attack the problem in a different way. By moving the main data into a hierarchy in MongoDB, they were able to read the same data in a single query versus a combination of joins, sub-selects, and separate queries of the existing database. This in turn solved their immediate database issue and also helped to future-proof the application. Read more: cnet news