"If we project forward a little bit in time, all enterprises will have tools in these three buckets ," Merriman said at the NoSQL Now! conference in San Jose, Calif. He is CEO and co-founder of 10gen, which develops and supports MongoDB, an open source, non-relational database in the NoSQL vein. Enterprise needs are expanding beyond what OLTP and business intelligence systems can accommodate, Merriman explained. "We need something, though, for some of these scale problems and you can't solve them with the existing architectures. We'd also like something that better fits writing code today," with object orientation and agile development methodologies becoming more prominent, said Merriman.

The non-relational NoSQL bucket meets the need for a backing store for Web application servers, content management systems, structured event logging, server-side storage for mobile applications, and document storage, Merriman said. NoSQL databases do online data processing and storage and manipulation but do not support complex, transactional semantics, such as what an Oracle database does. NoSQL is defined at the as next-generation databases that are non-relational, horizontally scalable, distributed, and open source. They were originally intended to serve as modern Web-scale databases.

MongoDB was first published in 2009 and has users including Craigslist, Shutterfly, and Foursquare, according to 10gen.