CouchDB Tutorial: Starting to relax with CouchDB

Liam Green-Hughes concluding after briefly presenting the basic features in CouchDB:

It seems so far that the non-relational approach isn’t necessarily “better” than traditional relational databases, but that they are different tools that will perform well in different circumstances. It shows a lot of potential, the use of JavaScript as a query language could prove to be much more flexible that something like SQL stored procedures and the flexibility offered by the schema-less way data is stored could be useful for organisations going through great change and needing their systems to be flexible. It does seem that a bit of standardisation of the data is needed though (e.g. such as adding a “type” field in the example above) in order to get the most out of the query engine.

Summarized:

• NoSQL is an option not a replacement
• schema-less data models are a good fit for evolving systems that need flexibility
• MapReduce with JavaScript has a lot of potential — just check this example where MapReduce proves to be more useful than both queries and full text indexing

Only for these conclusions and I’m tempted to include the link on the NoSQL guides page.

Original title and link: CouchDB Tutorial: Starting to relax with CouchDB (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)

via: http://www.greenhughes.com/content/starting-relax-couchdb