 |
 |
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