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What's up with schema-less db systems?

Posted: Mon Jun 07, 2010 1:02 pm
by Luke
I've noticed a lot of talk on the nets about schema-less db systems such as CouchDB and MongoDB. What exactly is the benefit of these? I can't imagine they're good for aggregate queries, sorting, searching by column, etc. So what is the benefit? Are they more for just storing "documents" and retrieving them one at a time? In what situation would I benefit from choosing a DB system like this?

Re: What's up with schema-less db systems?

Posted: Mon Jun 07, 2010 5:24 pm
by Eran
schema-less databases aim to solve two major problems - indexing a large amount of documents (which most relational database are not very good at), and handling rows/items with unknown number of attributes (=columns). Of course you lose most of the benefits of relational databases, but it's an effective solution for applications with specific problems (such as Google indexing the Internet for example).