On Mon, 12 Apr 2010, Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
So, as usual, the right tool for the job. If all you really need is a
key-value store on ID, then a "NoSQL" solution may be the right thing. But
if you need actual querrying and joining, then personally I'd stick with
rdbms unless I had some concrete reason to think a more complicated
"nosql"+solr solution was required. Certainly if you are planning on using
Solr _anyway_ because your application is a search engine of some type, that
would lessen the incremental 'cost' of a nosql+solr solution.
I'm surprised that I keep hearing so much about "NoSQL" for key-value
stores, and everyone seems to forget the *old* key-value stores, such as
directory services (X.500 and LDAP, although that's actually the protocol
used to query them, not the storage implementation).
Yes, there are things that LDAP doesn't do so well (relationships being
one of them), but it supports querying, you can adjust the matching by
attribute (ie, this one's matched as a number, this one's matched as a
string, this one's a case insensitive string ... I think some
implementations have functionality to run the search term through a
functions for things like soundex, so it might be possible add hooks for
stemming and query expansion, etc.)
I think that NoSQL got a lot of press because of Google having used it
(and their having a *VERY* large data system -- but not everyone has that
large of a system; also, Google did it 10+ years ago -- you can now
through a lot more CPU and RAM at an RDBMS, so the point at which the
database becomes a problem isn't the same as it was when Google first came
out.)
...
So, I think that there are cases where NoSQL is the right solution for the
job, and I think there are times when an DRBMS is the right solution ...
there are also plenty of times for flat file databases, XML, LDAP, and a
slew of other storage standards.
-Joe
hmm ... now I'm going to have to try to bring back my attempt to put my
catalogs into a directory service ... I have a feeling I'm going to run
into issues with unit conversions when searching.
