On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 10:55 AM, Thomas Dowling <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> So let's say (hypothetically, of course) that a colleague tells you he's
> considering a NoSQL database like MongoDB or CouchDB, to store a couple
> tens of millions of "documents", where a document is pretty much an
> article citation, abstract, and the location of full text (not the full
> text itself).  Would your reaction be:
>

There's really two reactions in here. One about NoSQL and the other
about your colleague.

As for NoSQL i would be on the side that the ecosystem is here to stay
although individual projects may or may not take off/evolve. The best
description I've seen about nosql as a whole is "choice"[1]. Not
having to shove everything in a similar style database for every
project and making the database fit the data/use. Theres a large
number of projects now, each with their own priorities and the
trade-offs they've made to reach them. Some care about consistency,
others "eventual consistency" is good enough and others go as far as
distributed transactions over nodes. Some do lazy writes to disk,
others not. How you query your data also varies quite a bit with
sql-like, map/reduce, hadoop, etc.

From your brief description it sounds like quite a few projects could
fit the bill, including rdbms-types, and which one you want would
probably depend on what you think you might do in the future. If you
foresee yourself having lots of fields that might only cover certain
subsets of the dataset then couchdb or the like are probably worth
looking at.

As for the colleague, I guess the question is why? If it is because of
trendiness then "Bwahahahah!!!" might be the best answer. But I'm
guessing they've thought about the data and what benefits they would
get out of the backend.

[1] http://blog.couch.io/post/511008668/nosql-is-about