Quote:When Microsoft rolled out an open source extension stack for PostgreSQL to handle document-style data, it wasn't just taking aim at MongoDB – the dominant NoSQL player – but also blurring the lines between relational and non-relational databases, according to one expert.

Despite the tech giant having built a multitrillion-dollar valuation largely on proprietary software, its latest bid to back open source systems and compete in the document database market promises a schema-light approach popular with developers.

Quote:Microsoft also notes that its extensions can be used with FerretDB, an open source MongoDB alternative. FerretDB claims its 2.0 version delivers up to 20x performance improvements for certain workloads over earlier versions, partly due to backend optimizations.

"The intellectual distance between document/JSON DBMSes and relational DBMSes is shrinking. At some point, the two system categories will be indistinguishable (at least in terms of the data model). The DocumentDB/FerretDB announcement is further evidence of this," he said.

"All the NoSQL systems are becoming relational, except for [key-value database] Redis. They now expose a relational data model with support for nested data (for example, JSON). They also expose a SQL interface, but they can't get themselves to call it SQL for some reason. Instead, they give their query languages a different name – Cassandra has CQL and Aerospike has AQL – and claim it is 'inspired' by SQL. Even MongoDB added support for SQL in their Atlas service in 2022."