Re:Why CouchDB?
by jchrisa on Tuesday December 09, 2008 @09:50PM
(#392336)
oops, commented when I meant to reply. Here goes:
CouchDB is different from a relational DB in so many ways its almost silly to be doing the comparison. However, many people use and understand SQL, so we must show them what differences to expect.
Your argument about normalization being more realistic has its place. CouchDB models documents, which by necessity are somewhat complete, even when taken from their original context. Document modeling is radically different from relational modeling.
In document modeling, more emphasis is placed on the document life-cycle as opposed to inter-record normalization (relations). And in document modeling the client has a greater responsibility for saving data that is useful to the user, rather than asking the relational store to reconstruct the objects.
I think there are a lot of uses for CouchDB alongside relational DBs, but I'm especially excited to see what kinds of crazy things people figure out how to do with p2p offline replication.
CouchDB is different from a relational DB in so many ways its almost silly to be doing the comparison. However, many people use and understand SQL, so we must show them what differences to expect.
Your argument about normalization being more realistic has its place. CouchDB models documents, which by necessity are somewhat complete, even when taken from their original context. Document modeling is radically different from relational modeling.
In document modeling, more emphasis is placed on the document life-cycle as opposed to inter-record normalization (relations). And in document modeling the client has a greater responsibility for saving data that is useful to the user, rather than asking the relational store to reconstruct the objects.
I think there are a lot of uses for CouchDB alongside relational DBs, but I'm especially excited to see what kinds of crazy things people figure out how to do with p2p offline replication.