Diaspora: All content tagged as Diaspora in NoSQL databases and polyglot persistence
Wednesday, 19 January 2011
Diaspora Drops MongoDB for MySQL or Social Data and Graph Databases
The first alpha of Diaspora, released a while back, was using MongoDB and that brought both project some press.
Now I’ve heard that MongoDB has been replaced with MySQL. And the reason is not security. Sarah Mei1tweeted:
Social data is relational. […] amazingly enough, document databases aren’t great at storing relational data
That’s a very interesting remark.
Leaving aside for a second the size of social data which some would say poses questions about the cost effectiveness of using relational databases, I think this is just another example of confusing relationships for relational model.
Social data is fundamentally unstructured and that makes it a good fit for schemaless storage. Even those that are using RDBMSes for storing social data are bending them to fit unstructured inside a schema constraint storage.
On the other hand, social data keeps its value if existing relationships are preserved.
So, is there a solution that would allow one to store unstructured data showing strong relationships? And I’d say the answer is obviously graph databases.
But the size challenge remains and while some are testing various approaches, graph databases are still difficult to scale.
Update: Sarah Mei mentioned on Twitter that she actually meant relational, but didn’t provide any other details.
Original title and link: Diaspora Drops MongoDB for MySQL or Social Data and Graph Databases (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)
Thursday, 23 September 2010
MongoDB and Security via Diaspora
When asked why MongoDB is using their own query language instead of SQL, the answer was that using JSON for both data and queries made more sense. Plus, it helped avoid injection attacks. As showed by Patrick McKenzie’s post on recently released Diaspora, turns out this is not quite true:
Diaspora uses MongoDB, one of the new sexy NoSQL database options. I use a few myself. They have a few decades less experience getting exploited than the old relational databases you know and love, so let’s start: I claim this above code snippet gives me full read access to the database, including to serialized encryption keys.
The conclusion is quite obvious: as long as developers continue to use string concatenation and interpolation, the query language doesn’t really matter. So you might be better off with something that people feel familiar with.
Original title and link: MongoDB and Security via Diaspora (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)
via: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/09/22/security-lessons-learned-from-the-diaspora-launch/
Thursday, 16 September 2010
Diaspora, The Open Source Social Network, Uses MongoDB
Diaspora — the project started as an open source alternative to Facebook at the time Facebook was facing user complaints to their changes to the user privacy — has published its first alpha version on GitHub. According to the README, it sounds like Diaspora is using MongoDB.
I am pretty sure that the decision was not made based on the recent MongoDB scaling features, but rather on the feature set that made the initial developers feel comfortable and familiar to develop this first alpha version. On the other hand, seeing Rails 3 in the same list may just mean they tried their hands with the latest and greatest.
Original title and link: Diaspora, The Open Source Social Network, Uses MongoDB (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)
