On May 9, 2012, at 2:53 PM, <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
1. I'm in data management. There is a strong business case for having robust business descriptions for each column (where it came from, what it means, who entered it, how it's calculated...etc). Risk officers need to analyze what data is in a db that (aka after a developer builds the database and moves on nobody will know what attributes exist--without reverse engineering the application). That sounds like documentation. I strongly agree that data formats/schemas should be documented, but that documentation doesn’t need to be part of the database, and I don’t think there’s any really good place to put it in a schemaless storage system like CouchDB. In general, if you want highly structured data that rigidly and enforceably follows a predefined structure, you’ve come to the wrong place — that’s exactly what NoSQL is *not* about. It’s sort of like a C++ developer wandering into a JavaScript conference and asking people how they enforce type-safety, constness and member access privileges. —Jens
