On 9 Feb 2009, at 16:56, Alan Bell wrote:
selling airline tickets was always the classical problem you
couldn't do with Notes because you might overbook because of the
distributed system means no atomic updates and stock level checking.
That actually just shows how much older Notes is than the modern
airline where overbooking is standard policy. Anyhow an application
where there are multiple purchasers and a finite stock and the stock
levels must never ever be overcommitted probably gives the RDBMS an
advantage.
A single node CouchDB or a double-write (note, not
2-phase-commit) pair can handle this pretty well. It just
has limitations that true p2p setups don't have.
Cheers
Jan
--
Wout Mertens wrote:
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.
