Schema-less is usually a lie

Re:Schema-less is usually a lie by joe_the_user on Wednesday July 03, 2013 @05:01PM (#5987490)

If the DB is determining the schema and your code just mirrors it, you will inevitably do things like triggers, stored procedures, etc. that essentially put application code inside the DB. This makes testing and maintenance of such things all but impossible, even if it does make the DB queries fast.

I don't believe this is necessarily true. I think it depends on the structure of the enterprise.

The traditional relational database seems to center on what could be called the "traditional large enterprise". This large enterprise tends to have many projects sharing the same static data and here a single store for that data makes sense and that store can and should have a standard interface, which can be embodied as stored procedures if necessary and would have to be well-defined enough that individual applications can deal with it.

That's the "traditional large enterprise". Today, however, we have large companies where single application has become the essence of the company (Google, Facebook, etc)and the one-datastore, multiple-applications model no longer makes sense and it does make sense to move more data manipulation the application level.

Still, when making pronouncements about what works best, I think context is important.

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Re:Schema-less is usually a lie by dragonwriter on Wednesday July 03, 2013 @05:12PM (#5987553)

> Today, however, we have large companies where single application has become the essence of the company (Google, Facebook, etc)and the one-datastore, multiple-applications model no longer makes sense

Which "one application" is the essence of Google?

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Re:Schema-less is usually a lie by coldtea on Wednesday July 03, 2013 @08:06PM (#5988299)

All of them. Google is mainly a bunch of "one applications".

Maps is maps, Search is search, YouTube is YouTube, GMail is Gmail etc. Those are not apps providing different views of the same data, in the way the parent describer enterprise apps.

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Re:Schema-less is usually a lie by joe_the_user on Wednesday July 03, 2013 @05:31PM (#5987660)

Whatever, say, Google-a-few-year-back then.

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Re:Schema-less is usually a lie by dragonwriter on Wednesday July 03, 2013 @05:38PM (#5987697)

Which just illustrates that while comparatively young companies may all be all about one application, its not exactly unusual even for a company that starts out that way to rapidly grow into one providing a large array of applications with overlapping use of data.

While there are reasons that running all those applications for, say, Google on a shared RDBMS backend isn't the right answer, the reason isn't that Google has a single application that uses all its data and so doesn't have to worry about coordination between different applications using the same data.

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