The Untold Story of NoSQL Databases

Thanks to MongoDB for sponsoring this video. The all-in-one data platform for AI, easy ops, and distributed systems, visit https://fandf.co/4r2Rktk to learn more about MongoDB Atlas. Relational databases pushed back with more RAM, more CPU, faster disks—but joins dragged, transactions blocked, and “scaling up” started to feel like denial. In war rooms and hallway chats, one question surfaced: what if the problem isn’t our queries, but how we store data at all? By 2009, there were enough of these that they needed a name. At a meetup in San Francisco, one stuck: NoSQL—“Not Only SQL.” The term was loose, but the message was sharp: the one-size-fits-all era was over. For a while, the landscape splintered. Special-purpose engines multiplied. Architectures became more powerful—and more fragile. New possibilities arrived with new ways to fail. Underneath it all, a quieter need remained: something you could use for most of an app’s data, flexible enough for messy modern workloads, distributed