NoSQL-based solutions provide answers to most of the challenges that we put up. Note that if ACME Grocery is very confident that it will not shape up as we discussed earlier, we do not need NoSQL. If ACME Grocery does not intend to grow, integrate, or provide integration with other applications, surely, the RDBMS will suffice. But that is not how anyone would like the business to work in the long term.
So, at some point in time, sooner or later, these questions will arise.
Let us see what NoSQL has to offer against each technical question that we have:
Schema flexibility: Column-oriented databases (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column-oriented_DBMS) store data as columns as opposed to rows in RDBMS. This allows flexibility of adding one or more columns as required, on the fly. Similarly, document stores that allow storing semi-structured data are also good options.
Complex queries: NoSQL databases do not have support for relationships or foreign keys. There are no complex queries...