Please see a more recent update of the NoSQL trends at NoSQL Job Trends – September 2010.

In the past, I have posted about job trends for traditional programming languages as well as Web 2.0 programming languages. This is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to skills that jobs may require. In this installment, I wanted to look at a current hot topic, NoSQL data stores. With the current state of the internet, RDBMS-alternatives are being sought due to the amount of data being generated and the various ways this data needs to be accessed. As was done for the previous job trends posts, I looked at the trends from Indeed and SimplyHired to see what technologies were garnering demand. In order to get a feeling for how these technologies were growing, I have not included traditional RDBMS systems (MySQL, Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server) as they would skew the data. The initial list of tools was source from Rick Cattell’s Scalable DataStores page, which also links to some excellent PDFs.

You will notice that two tools are missing, Hadoop and Cassandra. Cassandra is not included as there was too much noise in the job data that could not be reliably filtered out. Hadoop was not included, though HBase is part of it, because it skewed the results in a way that made the other trends hard to decipher. So, when looking at these trends, you should assume that both Hadoop and Cassandra should be reviewed as well. The tools that are included in this analysis are Redis, Voldemort, SimpleDB, CouchDB, MongoDB, HBase and Hypertable.

Let’s start by looking the the basic trends from Indeed.

As you can see, the NoSQL movement is fairly new with HBase being the earliest arrival around May 2008. Even for the short trends, you can see that all of the trends are increasing fairly rapidly. HBase looks like it will continue its lead due to it being a component of Hadoop, the most popular NoSQL framework and an Apache project. Hypertable seems to be struggling to maintain momentum, and Redis is a relative newcomer based on these trends.

Now, what do the trends for the same list of tools look like on SimplyHired.

Due to the shorter timeline, SimplyHired gives us slightly better insight into the trends. However, there seem to be fewer jobs on SimplyHired for this set of technologies, making the trends a litter harder to decipher. One interesting note is that SimplyHired does reflect the same trend spike that Indeed had for SimpleDB around October 2009. Otherwise, HBase continues to lead the pack by a bit, with CouchDB and SimpleDB not far behind. The trend lines for the others are fairly flat or just do not have much data behind them. One noticeable difference is that Redis seems to be more popular in this trend graph than it is in the Indeed trends.

Finally, let’s look at the relative growth trends from Indeed.

The relative growth does show some interesting information. HBase is clearly growing quicker than the others, so we can assume that HBase and its Hadoop siblings will continue to be in demand. SimpleDB shows the same growth spike as it does in the raw job data. MongoDB is one growth line that does stand out as it does not directly correlate to its current popularity. This shows that MongoDB could see some solid growth in the coming months. Voldemort is not showing the growth I would have expected based on its popularity, and Hypertable is not showing significant growth as it lags behind the rest of the field. Redis being a newcomer definitely affects its popularity, but it is showing solid growth so far.

So, if you are interested in these types of jobs, you may also want to take a look at this list of links to NoSQL required reading.

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