From an excellent Ars Technica article: Choosing between MySQL and NoSQL.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/to-sql-or-nosql-thats-the-database-question/
“For 30 years in the IT industry, we’ve had traditional development models,” Gnau said. “We grab users, put them in a room, get their requirements, build out the design, look for data to find structures and reporting, implement and hand it back to users. It was a traditional waterfall approach. Even agile development starts with requirements and winds up with results.
“In Hadoop, you need to challenge that and turn it around. Data is not structured. Users may not know what the requirements are. It’s an inverse process—you land the data, find data scientists to find relationships that are interesting and appealing, and turn that into requirements that yield a system. It’s the opposite approach to a traditional process.”