Re: [CODE4LIB] NoSQL - is this a real thing or a flash in the pan?

2010-04-12 Thread Benjamin Young
On 4/12/10 5:04 PM, Andrew Hankinson wrote: Couldn't you do MARC -> MARCXML -> JSON? -Andrew Certainly, but the hard part is knowing what you want MARC to look like once it's in JSON. XML 2 JSON conversions generally need some "love" to make the data meaningful on the JSON side (as attri

Re: [CODE4LIB] NoSQL - is this a real thing or a flash in the pan?

2010-04-12 Thread Jonathan Rochkind
There are at least TWO good marc2json formats, and several open source scripts at least for Bill Dueber's, no? Benjamin Young wrote: On 4/12/10 4:47 PM, Ryan Eby wrote: You could put your logs, marc records broken out by fields or arrays/hashes (types in couchdb) in any of them but the appr

Re: [CODE4LIB] NoSQL - is this a real thing or a flash in the pan?

2010-04-12 Thread Andrew Hankinson
Couldn't you do MARC -> MARCXML -> JSON? -Andrew On 2010-04-12, at 5:00 PM, Benjamin Young wrote: > On 4/12/10 4:47 PM, Ryan Eby wrote: >> You could put your logs, marc records broken out by fields or >> arrays/hashes (types in couchdb) in any of them but the approach each >> takes would limit y

Re: [CODE4LIB] NoSQL - is this a real thing or a flash in the pan?

2010-04-12 Thread Benjamin Young
On 4/12/10 4:47 PM, Ryan Eby wrote: You could put your logs, marc records broken out by fields or arrays/hashes (types in couchdb) in any of them but the approach each takes would limit you (or empower you) differently. Once there's a good marc2json script (and format) out there, it'd be gra

Re: [CODE4LIB] NoSQL - is this a real thing or a flash in the pan?

2010-04-12 Thread Ryan Eby
On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 2:42 PM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote: > Yeah, I may have gotten it completely wrong. > > Okay, help this grasshopper (possibly by pointing me to relevant > documentation), what's the difference between "document-based" and > "key-value store"?  When I've looked at CouchDB befor

Re: [CODE4LIB] NoSQL - is this a real thing or a flash in the pan?

2010-04-12 Thread Chad Fennell
> So let's say (hypothetically, of course) that a colleague tells you he's > considering a NoSQL database like MongoDB or CouchDB, to store a couple > tens of millions of "documents", where a document is pretty much an > article citation, abstract, and the location of full text (not the full > text

Re: [CODE4LIB] NoSQL - is this a real thing or a flash in the pan?

2010-04-12 Thread Thomas Dowling
On 04/12/2010 03:26 PM, Ryan Eby wrote: > > As for the colleague, I guess the question is why?... He's hoping it'll impress the babes. :-) Seriously (and not to draw the conversation to a close), thanks to all for their insights. -- Thomas Dowling tdowl...@ohiolink.edu

Re: [CODE4LIB] NoSQL - is this a real thing or a flash in the pan?

2010-04-12 Thread Sam Kome
- is this a real thing or a flash in the pan? On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 12:22 PM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote: > The thing is, the NoSQL stuff is pretty much just a key-value store. > There's generally no way to "query" the store, instead you can simply look > up a document b

Re: [CODE4LIB] NoSQL - is this a real thing or a flash in the pan?

2010-04-12 Thread Benjamin Young
From my understanding of key/value stores, one can put documents on the other side of the key, but any and all parsing/processing of that value happens outside of the database. In CouchDB, the entire document is query-able from within map/reduce views. After being querying on, those keys are in

Re: [CODE4LIB] NoSQL - is this a real thing or a flash in the pan?

2010-04-12 Thread Joe Hourcle
On Mon, 12 Apr 2010, Ryan Eby wrote: [trimmed] But I'm guessing they've thought about the data and what benefits they would get out of the backend. Wow. You obviously don't work with the same folks that I do. I've been attached to one project for about 16 months now, while the rest of the

Re: [CODE4LIB] NoSQL - is this a real thing or a flash in the pan?

2010-04-12 Thread Ryan Eby
On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 10:55 AM, Thomas Dowling wrote: > So let's say (hypothetically, of course) that a colleague tells you he's > considering a NoSQL database like MongoDB or CouchDB, to store a couple > tens of millions of "documents", where a document is pretty much an > article citation, abs

Re: [CODE4LIB] NoSQL - is this a real thing or a flash in the pan?

2010-04-12 Thread Jonathan Rochkind
Yeah, I may have gotten it completely wrong. Okay, help this grasshopper (possibly by pointing me to relevant documentation), what's the difference between "document-based" and "key-value store"? When I've looked at CouchDB before, despite it describing itself as "document based", I haven't b

Re: [CODE4LIB] NoSQL - is this a real thing or a flash in the pan?

2010-04-12 Thread Jay Luker
On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 12:22 PM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote: > The thing is, the NoSQL stuff is pretty much just a key-value store. > There's generally no way to "query" the store, instead you can simply look > up a document by ID. > > Schemaless != "no way to query". Key-value stores, like memcac

Re: [CODE4LIB] NoSQL - is this a real thing or a flash in the pan?

2010-04-12 Thread Ross Singer
On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 12:22 PM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote: > The thing is, the NoSQL stuff is pretty much just a key-value store. >  There's generally no way to "query" the store, instead you can simply look > up a document by ID. Actually, this depends largely on the NoSQL DBMS in question. Som

Re: [CODE4LIB] NoSQL - is this a real thing or a flash in the pan?

2010-04-12 Thread Joe Hourcle
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 concr

Re: [CODE4LIB] NoSQL - is this a real thing or a flash in the pan?

2010-04-12 Thread Jonathan Rochkind
The thing is, the NoSQL stuff is pretty much just a key-value store. There's generally no way to "query" the store, instead you can simply look up a document by ID. If this meets the needs of your application, all you need is a key-value store, and not any kind of query, then it's definitely

Re: [CODE4LIB] NoSQL - is this a real thing or a flash in the pan?

2010-04-12 Thread Benjamin Young
SQL-style JOINs can be done in CouchDB (can't speak for the other NoSQL DB's). In CouchDB, it's called view collation: http://chrischandler.name/couchdb/view-collation-for-join-like-behavior-in-couchdb/ It's a different way of thinking (as there are no tables, and map/reduce goes through every

Re: [CODE4LIB] NoSQL - is this a real thing or a flash in the pan?

2010-04-12 Thread Benjamin Young
I'd actually vote for the "sensible, forward-looking approach." The BBC (for one) is already using CouchDB in a production: http://damienkatz.net/2010/03/bbc_and_couchdb.html That said, NoSQL as a "movement" is as wide and varied as the RDBMS world, and there are pros and cons to each. I'm per

Re: [CODE4LIB] NoSQL - is this a real thing or a flash in the pan?

2010-04-12 Thread Ross Singer
The advantage of the NoSQL DBs is that they're schema-less which allows much more flexibility in your data going in. However, it sounds like your schema may be pretty standardized -- I'm not sure of a huge advantage (outside the aforementioned replication functionality) you'd get. -Ross. On Mon,

Re: [CODE4LIB] NoSQL - is this a real thing or a flash in the pan?

2010-04-12 Thread Peter Schlumpf
I'd opt for the first response. I hope NoSQL is not flash in the pan. It makes eminent sense to me. SQL is just one way of looking at data. A level of abstraction. What authority says that SQL is the only or the best way of looking at a dataset? Or the MARC record format for that matter?

Re: [CODE4LIB] NoSQL - is this a real thing or a flash in the pan?

2010-04-12 Thread Robert Sanderson
Depends on the sort of features required, in particular the access patterns, and the hardware it's going to run on. In my experience, NoSQL systems (for example apache's Cassandra) have extremely good distribution properties over multiple machines, much better than SQL databases. Essentially, it'

Re: [CODE4LIB] NoSQL - is this a real thing or a flash in the pan?

2010-04-12 Thread Kozlowski,Brendon
I personally would vote for: "This guy's on the bleeding edge. Personally, I'd hold off, but it could work." However, I attended a webinar on MongoDB and apparently the representative stated that SourceForge has moved to a NoSQL platform using MongoDB and tested their load with 100x growth and