You're right, in order to get something similar to Mongo's collections or
RDBMS' tables, you will have to add a "documentType" property to all your
documents.
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Eric B wrote:
I've been reading up on CouchDB and am very confused as to its application
in a real world web application. I can see it's benefit on a subset of
data, but as a primary DB for a web application, I can't say that I can see
how to do things.
Coming from my RDBMS background, I would build a basic shopping cart web
app with a bunch of tables:
- users
- permissions
- items
- inventory
- clients
- orders
- etc...
I realize that NoSQL allows me to denormalize a lot of that data (which is
fine) in order to speed up processing/etc, and the concept of "tables" no
longer applies. I'm fine with that. But where I get lost is how to
organize similar datasets together in CouchDB. In MongoDB, they have
Collections - akin to tables - to help separate data.
I don't see anything equivalent in CouchDB. Which would mean to throw all
my data into a single "bag"/collection and rely entirely on map
functions/views to help organize data. For instance, to retrieve all users
from the system, I would need a map function that does something like:
emit all docs that have a username field.
But then what happens if at a later point in time, I create another
document that has a username field (which isn't a user)? It will break my
code.
So then my second option becomes to assign a "document-type" key to every
document and then filter upon that. Where my "document-type" key is akin
to an organizational/collection name. It's definitely better, but still
seems a little odd.
The whole process seems very disorganized.
I understand the concept that NoSQL is exactly that - a key/value store,
where structure is omitted. But I would have expected at the very least
some organization ability - no?
Am I missing something basic/obvious in CouchDB? Or is the concept to use
separate DBs everytime you want to organize similar data together? That
also seems a little odd too.
Thanks,
Eric
