Rails and CouchDB - Architectural Concerns

Question

I am working on a project that is going to use CouchDB for flexible storage of documents. The requirements of my system are a neat match for CouchDB for storage.

BUT

My question really boils down to this: Should I keeop using ActiveRecord and MySQL as well ... there are a raft of handy Plugins that are all readily available for use with ActiveRecord (such as authentication and access control). Just wondering if the advantages of leveraging existing plugins is worth the extra management overhead and possible integration issues (working across disparate datastores).

Answer 1

You can use both; Some models can still be ActiveRecord, and others can be CouchDB.

Answer 2

It is not uncommon to have to deal with several persistent stores in a single application. A very common approach is to use a relational database that stores paths pointing to files that are stored in a file system.

So you might think as CouchDB as a special "file system" for a special part of your data model.

Also, in larger applications, multiple stores and complex physical architectures are quite common, so don't be shy of using more than one persistent store for your models.