We have dozens if not in the low hundreds of SQL tables.
So, while we do have a huge pile of legacy code not using SQL you can map your NoSQL data structures to SQL tables and you can also later on convert to a more efficient format that gives you bitmap indices and so on, while still using the global storage backend.
So, it may have been NoSQL until some point in the nineties and after that it was really NotOnlySQL.
There's something a bit therapeutic about seeing the indices, including bitmap indices, and all the data on disk in a format that's intuitive and usable for humans that you can use without going through SQL, but either by accessing it directly or through the built-in ORM system. You don't get that with PostgreSQL or MySQL, or conversely, MongoDB or CouchDB. It's both worlds. Sure, there's a lot of stuff from PostgreSQL that I would kill for - any volunteers? - but as a compromise between the two worlds it works quite well indeed.
The awesomest points are the %ID pseudo-column, implicit joins, embedded SQL (which compiles SQL down to native MUMPS code, including cursors and all), near enough complete SQL-92 and DDL compliance. And the ORM stuff.
We have dozens if not in the low hundreds of SQL tables.
So, while we do have a huge pile of legacy code not using SQL you can map your NoSQL data structures to SQL tables and you can also later on convert to a more efficient format that gives you bitmap indices and so on, while still using the global storage backend.
So, it may have been NoSQL until some point in the nineties and after that it was really NotOnlySQL.
There's something a bit therapeutic about seeing the indices, including bitmap indices, and all the data on disk in a format that's intuitive and usable for humans that you can use without going through SQL, but either by accessing it directly or through the built-in ORM system. You don't get that with PostgreSQL or MySQL, or conversely, MongoDB or CouchDB. It's both worlds. Sure, there's a lot of stuff from PostgreSQL that I would kill for - any volunteers? - but as a compromise between the two worlds it works quite well indeed.
Edit: Here's more info:
http://docs.intersystems.com/cache20131/csp/docbook/DocBook....
The awesomest points are the %ID pseudo-column, implicit joins, embedded SQL (which compiles SQL down to native MUMPS code, including cursors and all), near enough complete SQL-92 and DDL compliance. And the ORM stuff.