NoSQL Engines (MongoDB, etc.)

[Carson]

Has anyone used any NoSQL engines, such as Mongo, on any of their projects?

For those who don't know the appeal vs. SQL, the idea of NoSQL is that you can find stuff without awkwardly concatting a string together to form a command. Instead, you just use objects in the language to represent models and database results.

So, in Javascript, the following would produce a user record:

db.user.find( { "user_id": 42 }, { "history": 0 } )

 

[Luke]

I haven't really looked into NoSQL but from my understanding you can't do relational databases right? Based on that I don't think I would be able to use it as most things I write tend to require relational databases.

 

[Carson]

I haven't really looked into NoSQL but from my understanding you can't do relational databases right? Based on that I don't think I would be able to use it as most things I write tend to require relational databases.

It's not relational in the sense that you maintain fields with ids. With most implementations, you just drop objects into other objects, essentially. So it is much easier, especially in the sense that it is much more intuitive. The need for one-to-one relationships is eliminated, because anything that is used in only one object is just stored as a sub-object of that object.