In the past, I have posted about job trends for traditional programming languages as well as Web 2.0 programming languages. This is another part of the job trends series, the NoSQL job trends, which I started about 6 months ago. NoSQL data stores continue to be a hot topic as more services implement them for massive data. 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. I have continued to avoid including traditional RDBMS systems (MySQL, Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server) as they would skew the data.

You will notice that Hadoop is missing. 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. Hadoop is the clear leader in demand right now but more demand is appearing for specific components which makes the trends significantly easier to read. The tools that are included in this analysis are Cassandra, Redis, Voldemort, SimpleDB, CouchDB, MongoDB, HBase and Hypertable. One note on Cassandra is that there is a significant amount of noise in the trend data. This is due to Cassandra being a woman’s name and appearing in a significant number of jobs. However, as opposed to my previous post on NoSQL jobs, the trend for Cassandra has changed and can be used in this analysis.

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

You can quickly see in this graph that there was a huge surge at the beginning of this year. This surge has continued throughout the year as NoSQL popularity has continued to grow. Cassandra has seen a huge amount of increasing demand this year. Now that Facebook and Digg use it in production systems, that growth is likely to continue unless significant problems are found. HBase was the leader previously, due to being a component of Hadoop, but there is a clear change in the trend. HBase demand basically hit a plateau due to the growth of Cassandra and MongoDB. MongoDB demand has also skyrocketed in the past 6 months, overtaking HBase in that span. CouchDB and Redis have also shown solid growth. SimpleDB has been on a roller coaster ride for the past year, but is currently trending well. Voldemort does not have a good long term trend, but the past few months have shown slight growth. Hypertable does not seem to be able to maintain demand as its growth has flatlined.

Now, what do the trends look like on SimplyHired.

Due to the shorter timeline, SimplyHired gives us a different view on these trends. Here we can see the general growth of the NoSQL niche from the beginning of the year more clearly. Similar to the Indeed trends, we can see Cassandra quickly growing and becoming the leader (besides Hadoop of course). The one thing that is not obvious in the Indeed trends is the large dip from May to June. This could just be due to seasonal hiring practices, but we do not have enough history to compare with. Otherwise, the growth trends for Cassandra, HBase, MongoDB, and CouchDB are similar to the Indeed trends. Redis and SimpleDB are showing much slower growth than the leaders. SimplyHired shows a much clearer lack of demand for Voldemort and Hypertable.

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

I say the same thing with every job trends post, I love the relative growth chart from Indeed. The past 6 months have seen huge growth in MongoDB. Granted MongoDB is one of the younger technologies in a young niche, but there is a lot of hype around it. That hype seems to be driving demand. Cassandra and HBase still show a ton of growth regardless of how much demand is already there. Interestingly, Redis shows hockey-stick growth, but that has not translated to the same demand as some of the other NoSQL offerings. CouchDB seems to be growing nicely, while SimpleDB needs some consistency. Voldemort and Hypertable trail in relative growth as well, which really symbolizes how little traction they have at this time.

One quick question for you, are there any other NoSQL offerings that I should be including? Please let me know in the comments.

Other NoSQL Resources

The initial list of tools was source from Rick Cattell’s Scalable DataStores page, which also links to some excellent PDFs.

If you are interested in these types of jobs, take a look at this list of links about NoSQL required reading.