Support by bootstrap

Because they are open source, NoSQL alternatives lack vendors offering formal support. That's no deal breaker to most proponents, who are plugged closely into this Silicon Valley-centric community and are thus comfortable with the bootstrap approach.

But some admitted that working without a formal "throat to choke" when things go wrong was scary, at least for their managers.

"We did have to do some selling," admitted Adobe's Sena. "But basically after they saw our first prototype was working, we were able to convince the higher-ups that this was the right way to go."

Despite their huge promise, most enterprises needn't worry that they are missing out just yet, said Monash.

"Most large enterprises have an established way of doing OLTP [online transaction processing], probably via relational database management systems. Why change?" he said. MapReduce and similar BI-oriented projects "may be useful for enterprises. But where it is, it probably should be integrated into an analytic DBMS [database management system.]"

Even NoSQL's organizer, Oskarsson, admits that his company, Last.fm, has yet to move to a NoSQL alternative for production, instead relying on open-source databases.

He agrees that a revolution, for now, remains on hold.

"It's true that [NoSQL] aren't relevant right now to mainstream enterprises," Oskarsson said, "but that might change one to two years down the line."