Will document databases make an impact?
There has been a lot of buzz about Amazon’s SimpleDB and other related projects like CouchDB, Google’s Datastore and Thrudb. Personally I think they will all find a niche in modern web applications, but what I find amusing are the nay-sayers that talk about the faults and even saying they aren’t even databases.
Come on, not a database? What are these people smoking? Since when does database == relational ? So they don’t support all transactions, aggregate functions or other features that are common to RDBMs. Did it ever occur to these people that not all applications need these features?
Scalability
The prominent feature for these document style databases is scalability. One guy equates scalability to the number of rows in the database. Uhh, maybe someone should explain to him what scalability means. Who cares if you can put millions of rows in your db if you only have 100 users? What about say a few hundred thousand rows but millions of users? It isn’t necessarily the number of rows you can store but how quickly you can get data out to your users.
Where are my joins?
Others go on and on about how you can’t do things like join data across tables. There are many big sites that actually store data in multiple places. Yep, denormalizing (gasp!) their data in the name of speed. Sharding also fits into this category. Although generally sharding happens on a traditional RDBMS, the effect is the same, spreading data out for scalability sake.
It all comes down to the right tool for the job. Until recently RDMBS were pretty much the only tool in the toolbox, whether you needed all the features or not. Now we have more options to choose from and I’ll bet that many choose the alternate route. All the nay-sayers are just scared.
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[...] Technorati Search for: databases wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt There has been a lot of buzz about Amazon’s SimpleDB and other related projects like CouchDB, Google’s Datastore and Thrudb. Personally I think they will all find a niche in modern web applications, but what I find amusing are the nay-sayers that talk about the faults and even saying they aren’t even databases. Come on, not a database? What are these people smoking? Since when does database == relational ? So they don’t support all transactions, aggregate functions or other features that are c [...]