DISCLAIMER: I'm a certified Oracle8 DBA, so don't think I'm some young web developer who doesn't know data modeling or relational theory.
Here's my passionate plea ;-) For CMS/WCM purposes, there's nothing better. I know of a site that is in the millions of views daily that has nothing but MongoDB on the backend, and not only is performance great but so is ease of code maintenance. The performance benefits have been so significant that they implemented real-time analytics as well - and they don't cache anything coming in from MongoDB, as there's no need. For commerce systems, you still have separate "tables" for users, products and orders. What you don't have is a third normal form schema with 45,000 tables and a massive performance and maintenance headache. I've launched a commerce site myself very recently that sustains 900 requests per second. Absolutely sure this would not have worked as well with a relational engine under the hood. I'd go as far as to say that the next-generation document databases are doing a lot to challenge the norms. Remember when foreign keys were considered essential for data integrity? Remember when a database was only considered ready when it was fully ACID and ANSI SQL compliant? Think again. Part of me hates this transition, because I've spent the past 20 years really mastering the horse and buggy; but these jet planes sure are fast, and they do change the game. Just don't try to ride one like a horse! -- Mitch _______________________________________________ New York PHP Users Group Community Talk Mailing List http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk http://www.nyphp.org/Show-Participation
