Hi Ryan, I had a similar question but then I stumbled upon this page on the wiki:
http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/EntityRelationship I haven't tried it yet, but this may just be what you are looking for. Danny On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 11:28 AM, Ryan Zec <[email protected]> wrote: > I have been looking at a number of document databases (RavenDB, CouchDB, > MongoDB) and there are two things about them that I really like and makes me > what to incorporate them as much as possible and that is the schema-less > natural (not that they are schema-less per-say but that it is a very > flexible schema that is much easier to change than ones with RDBMS) and the > fact there is a lot less impedance mismatch when mapping the database data > to code. > > There have a been a number of things that I have found that have prevented > me from using a document database because I find I need these things all the > time. Some of them I have found solutions for like unique fields. While > document databases don't directly support this feature, a work around that > is acceptable is creating another document with the email is the document id > and then inserting the user if the insert on the email document was > successful however there are there is one big thing that I don't think > document database can provide me from my searching. > > That feature is relationships with complex documents. One of my projects I > wanted to use a document database for is a project management system. The > issue with this is that there are a lot of places where I need relationships > with large objects (and multiple relationships within one document). When > it come to something like a task or a user, those are complex documents and > having the document embedded would not be a good thing as data mismatch with > these items can't happen. Now if I just reference the document then am I > really getting any benefit from using a document database because now I am > probably going to have a lot more queries that I need to run compared to a > relational database. > > While I was hopping to have most of my data be stored into a document > database, the more I look at it, it seems like most of the data needs to be > in a RDBMS. Am I correct in assuming this type of relationship needs a > RDBMS or am I un-aware of how this can be accomplished in a document > database. > -- dannycastonguay US: 828.656.1212 Canada: 514.649.8954
