NoSQL has been getting a lot of attention in the industry recently. I'm really interested in what peoples thoughts are on the best use-cases for its use over relational database storage. What should trigger a developer into thinking that particular datasets are more suited to a NoSQL solution. I'm particularly interested in MongoDB and CouchDB as they seem to be getting the most coverage with regard to PHP development and that is my focus.
+2
A:
What I like about NoSQL has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with usability. Document stores are just easier to work with when your atomic data units are document-like, because it's trivial to serialize to and from objects. It's just more fun, and that's an important factor for personal or side projects.
ysimonson
2010-05-20 19:37:54
I wouldn't exactly say it's *trivial*, but this is otherwise a good point about Document-Oriented Databases. The reverse is actually true for some other NoSQL products - DKVSes tend to be *more difficult* to map than SQL/relational DBs.
Aaronaught
2010-05-20 19:43:22
+3
A:
I'd suggest this article by Rick Cattell about miscellaneous data stores (a.k.a. NoSQL), their differences and some of their use-cases: http://www.cattell.net/datastores/index.html
kishkash
2010-05-24 15:39:31
+7
A:
Just promise yourself that you will never try to map a relational data model to a NoSQL database like MongoDB or CouchDB... This is the most common mistake developers make when evaluating emerging tech.
That approach is analogous to taking a car and trying to use it to pull your cart down the road like a horse.
It's a natural reaction due to everyone's experience of course, but the real value in using a document database is being able to simplify your datamodel and minimize your suffering as a developer. Your codebase will shrink, your bugs will be fewer and easier to find, performance is going to be awesome, and scale will be much simpler.
As a Joomla founder I'm biased :-) but coming from the CMS space, something like MongoDB is a silver bullet as content maps very naturally to document systems.
Another great case for MongoDB is real-time analytics, as MongoDB has very strong performance and scale particularly regarding concurrency. There are case studies at the MongoDB.org website that demonstrate those attributes.
I agree with the notion that each database has its own aims and use cases; take the purpose of each database for evaluation accordingly.
spacemonkey
2010-05-24 20:07:30
+3
A:
Some great use-cases - for MongoDB anyway - are mentioned on the MongoDB site. The examples given are real-time analytics, Logging and Full Text search. These articles are all well worth a read http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Use+Cases
seengee
2010-05-26 08:24:17