A recap of a new user's journey into trying to learn OrientDB after a week at it.
*The good* - I see a lot of great features in OrientDB which I think are really useful - I find the Udemy class and documentation do a reasonable job. There are areas for improvement, but overall one can find most of the basics. - I see a lot of potential and areas where I think OrientDB would be a good match. Not coming from a graph background there is much in terms of concept I am still figuring out, but it seems manageable. *The bad* - - I can only guess the sql layer was created to help people familiar with SQL to use OrientDB. However, there are a number of inconsistencies which make it confusing and ad to the learning curve. Anywhere were it was easy to keep the same syntax/behaviour as sql it should have been kept. What may appear as flexibility is, in my opinion, can contribute to feature overload, make it harder to learn for new users and cause more work to maintain for the development team. - Number of features, sometimes some of which in my opinion are redundant, makes it harder to learn. Some of the work I see on orientdb-labs seems to address some of this. For example the unified Multi-model. - Storage is confusing. After years of using Postgresql recently started to look at NoSQL engines. Spent a few months learning Cassandra and have it in one small project to learn the ropes. I found their storage straight forward to understand. You have replication levels, read/write consistency and data is sharded. In the week I have been looking at OrientDB I have found storage to be one of the most confusing parts and also an area that needs work. From what I can tell data/indexes are not sharded yet. I believe Issue #6256 is about that. Even the definition of cluster in the manual is confusing... in https://orientdb.com/docs/last/Tutorial-Clusters.html it mentions it is loosely like a table, but from everything I have seen a class seems closer to a table in the RDBMS world. I still can't quite figure out if a cluster is the equivalent of a tablespace or if it is more like a "parent table" ( table made up of inherited tables with the same structure so one can query directly a single table or the parent table). - Online presence for OrientDB is not only confusing, but also frustrating: Google group suggests to use StackOverflow right on top; so what was this group created for then? I wrote an email to [email protected] and got no response. I did not expect that to go into a black hole. I asked on this group about training and got no response. Given the, very low, volume of posts in this group I am hard pressed to see why someone from OrientDB Ltd could not respond; at a minimum I expected someone to respond to the email. It is a very poor image and makes one wonder if one went with an enterprise license if one would get the same poor level of response. Right now I am looking at OrientDB for an internal project, but I would be very hard pressed to recommend it to any of my clients right now because I would be afraid we could not get support if we needed it. Specially the clients that would not have an issue with cost, would be the ones that would also be most demanding about making sure we have support. -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "OrientDB" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
