News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Ask HN: Why are relational DBs are the standard instead of graph-based DBs?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Why are relational DBs are the standard instead o... by paulryanrogers on Sunday October 03, 2021 @12:48PM (#28738520)
Not OP but my guess is NoSQL wins were data isn't very relational or traditional RDBMS and ACID don't fit. One could even argue that file systems and key value stores are NoSQL solutions that predate RDBMS. Yet a lot of businesses just need something reliable, roughly relational, and with a community of talent.

All that said, the world of successful solutions is not mutually exclusive or limited to only one winner.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Why are relational DBs are the standard instead o... by lazide on Sunday October 03, 2021 @04:43PM (#28740365)
In my experience (having worked with both for a decade or so), NoSQL is valuable when the desired performance characteristics and consistency needs diverge wildly between ‘relations’/entities. You run across similar with file systems and database boundaries.

Have a lot of data you need stored where there is limited relation between them directly, and attempting to be transactionally consistent across the boundaries there and the rest of the system is going to very expensive? Then doing some part of the data in a nosql db and the rest in a ACID compliant database is probably a good idea.

Similarly, putting 50GB vm images into a nosql db is probably pretty silly when it should probably be on a proper filesystem, or at most copied out and written back periodically.

And putting a bunch of data that is tightly coupled together and needs to be transactionally updated to ensure your dataset doesn’t turn to gibberish in a NoSQL backend is going to be a nightmare.

[ Parent | on HN ]