<p>Most students of the web trace the NoSQL movement back to Google and Amazon.</p><p>As they grew their enormously successful online services, Google and Amazon needed new ways of storing massive amounts of data across an ever-growing number of servers, so each created a new software platform that could do so. Google built BigTable. Amazon built Dynamo. And after these internet giants published research papers describing these sweeping data stores, so many other outfits sought to duplicate them.</p><p>The result was an army of "NoSQL" databases specifically designed to run across thousands of servers. These new-age software platforms including Cassandra, HBase, and Riak remade the database landscape, helping to run so many other web giants, including Facebook and Twitter, but also more traditional businesses.</p><p>"If you look at every NoSQL solution out there, every one goes back to the Amazon Dynamo paper or the Google BigTable paper," says Jason Hoffman, the chief technology officer at cloud computing outfit Joyent. "What would the world be like if no one at Google or Amazon ever wrote an academic paper?"</p><p><a href="http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/12/couchdb/">Keep reading...</a></p>