About a year ago, Mike Dirolf drew an enormous circle covering a sheet of paper. “Here are the people who use databases,” he said, “and here are the people who have even heard of NoSQL,” and he drew a circle this big: ° .

I think that interest has grown since then. By this time, the number of people that know about NoSQL is at least this big: o .

For evidence, let’s take a look at what people are searching for. First, here’s a Google Insights chart for a bunch of popular NoSQL solutions:

MongoDB vs. Cassandra vs. CouchDB vs. Redis vs. Riak (source)

Woohoo! MongoDB seems to be leading the charge, so far. But wait, now let’s compare MongoDB (the top line above) to some other databases:

MongoDB vs. Sybase vs. PostgreSQL vs. Firebird vs. Sqlite (source)

Okay, well, we’re behind everyone, but it’s not too bad. You start to see some patterns with the relational databases that you don’t yet so much with the NoSQL databases: people are using relational databases a lot more at work (during the week) than for fun (on the weekends). In fact, MongoDB is occasionally inching above Sybase on the weekends!

How about MySQL and Oracle? (I was trying to add Microsoft SQL Server to this, too, but I couldn’t figure out a representative set of search terms for it.)

MongoDB vs. MySQL vs. Oracle (source)

Sigh. Back to work, people. We have a ways to go.