On Feb 9, 2009, at 3:57 PM, Noah Slater wrote:
On Mon, Feb 09, 2009 at 09:51:18AM -0500, Adam Petty wrote:
Could this thread be added to the wiki - with only minor editing
for length
- maybe as "a RDBMS vs couch 'Discussion' ?" or something
similar?"...
We've learnt from the book that such comparisons tend to be harmful.
They lead people into thinking that there is a direct meaningful
comparison.
Fundamentally, CouchDB and RDMS solve different problems.
I dunno, I think it would be interesting to compare the main benefits
of each so that you know what the strong points of each are.
For example, suppose you implement schema-free in an RDBMS by adding a
text field that contains a JSON string. You still keep some of the
metadata, like _rev and _id, in proper fields.
However, thinking about that, it means you will need to re-implement
everything CouchDB does, like views and replication.
To be honest, I think saying RDBMS and CouchDB are for different
solutions is just you guys being nice. I think that any application
would benefit from using the CouchDB model and only in very specific,
very demanding cases an RDBMS would be better. I can't think of any
examples though.
So here's my challenge to the mailing list, it's pretty much the same
one that MrDonut posted: Give us an example of something that would be
better be done with an RDBMS and something that would better be done
with CouchDB.
I'll help you: I think it would be easier to create a wiki with
CouchDB than with an RDBMS. It is possible in both but CouchDB just
makes it easier. I suppose we'd have to ask the http://couch.it guys
to know if that's true.
I don't know what would be done better in an RDBMS. Performance
logging perhaps? Something with really stringent schema requirements?
Wout.
