1. Clearly, Dynamo, Bigtable, and Cassandra are critical technology to the companies that create them. Why did they allow their employees to publish academic papers about them? Why did they not keep them as proprietary secrets?

2. What do you think this movement means to the existing DBMS vendors? How serious is the NoSQL threat? Justify your answer. What responses by existing DBMS vendors would be sensible?

3. Is it a waste of your time to learn about the relational model and Microsoft Access? Why or why not?

4. Given what you know about AllRoad, should it use a relational DBMS, such as Oracle Database or MySQL, or should it use Cassandra?

5. Suppose that All Roaddecides to use a NoSQL solution, but a battle emerges among the employees in the IT Department. One faction wants to use Cassandra, but another faction wants to use a different NoSQL data store, named MongoDB (www.mongodb.org). Assume that you’re Kelly, and Lucas asks for your opinion about how he should proceed. How do you respond?