Are there any benefits to using MongoDB for a Node.js application rather than a traditional SQL database such as MySQL, if I'm not planning to have large (>1000 item) collections and am already comfortable with SQL?
MongoDB is schema-less document based database. This means you can insert a JSON object with other nested objects. This can make development easier, especially for prototyping.
For a small project, why not? For a larger project you should do more research. Large or small, doesn't hurt to do the research anyway. You want to consider how your application uses the database (reads vs writes) and how MongoDB scales horizontally, and how it handles failures.
There's a thing called the CAP theorem that defines NoSQL databases. MongoDB is CP. This visual guide shows the relationships between different databases. What is most important to you and your application?
Something else to consider is that most NoSQL databases are not ACID compliant. If you're using MySQL with InnoDB, that can be something significant to give up, depending on your application. For example, transactions might be something you might not want to give up.
Lots of pros and cons. Best thing to ask yourself is: What am I gaining? What am I giving up? There are many things, and it really depends on your use-case.
There are lots of reasons to stick with a simple dbms for a small-scale application. One of them is the widespread availability of cheap hosting services providing MySQL. Another is ease of deployment and maintenance.
Of course, if you're trying to learn to use MongoDB, go for it!
Related
I am building a social network (connections and their connections, messages and locations) and I am a little confused in deciding whether to go with a relational database (MySQL) or a no-sql system (MongoDB) when designing our backend APIs. Does anyone have any views on what to use when?
PS: I am building developer APIs for developers to tap into our system with oAuth. So scalability and performance is also key factor. Rails 3 + Devise (most likely).
This depends largely on which technology you are comfortable with, what exactly do you want to get out of this etc. etc.
Coming back to your question, not all data is relational. So For those situations, NoSQL can be helpful. With that said, NoSQL stands for "Not Only SQL". It's not intended to knock MySQL or supplant it.
SQL or MySQL has several very big advantages:
MySQL is Strong mathematical basis.
Declarative syntax.
A well-known language in Structured Query Language (SQL).
Highly proven and extremely reliable technology. MySQL has been around far more than the oldest noSQL. It's a mature piece of technology. Google Adsense runs on MySQL, Facebook persistent store is MySQL. The examples suggest its reliability.
As a result of being mature technology, people have optimised the shit out of it.
Enormous online and open source community both for support and providing features as opposed to noSQL technologies (look what happened to Cassandra)
In my opinion, all the above questions matter to me when I choose a piece of technology. Hey well, if it's a Sunday evening project that you want to whip up with little real world consequences then do what whims you but if it's slightly more serious then please consider these questions.
SQL hasn't gone away (even in noSQL). It's a mistake to think about this as an either/or argument. NoSQL is an alternative that people need to consider when it fits, that's all.
Documents can be stored in non-relational databases, like CouchDB or even in MySQL (it borders on abuse but still). A Relational database in principle could make a very good NOSQL solution
Check out this hilarious video. This gives a different perspective on this topic :)
I chose MongoDB for my "Social" application because of the flexibility of the schema and scalability/performance. MongoDB has allowed me to adjust my schema without having to make drastic code changes and makes reading/finding data very easy.
I also chose MongoDB as a learning experience. I wanted to know what all the fuss was about with these "noSQL" databases...and now I know why. MongoDB is awesome in my opinion and definitely worth looking at for a Social network that requires scalability and performance. Node.js would also be an excellent choice for the API ;)
neither.
Go with a network/graph database, you will not regret. My current favorite is Neo4j.
http://neo4j.org/
note: Not related to Neo4J
I think the latest version of Neo4J has a sql interface, just in case you would need SQL compatibility. Otherwise, do your crud using their native library. It is very fast.
If you would need to visualize the Graph data, which would be very impressive to show to your boss, use yEd package. To export neo4J to a graphml format, use this:
Convert Neo4j DB to XML?
You could front end your relationships in Neo4J and backend it with a relational db or mongodb. I have seen those hybrid architectures as well.
If you project requires actual relationships between certain objects then MySql will be fine. If you are storing things that typically just have inherent data to them, such as a user with messages to other users, then a document style database, such as MongoDB, makes more sense.
You can do relationships in mongo, but they make a lot more sense in a relational database. But, if most of your data is more inherent of a user then mongo makes more sense.
In your case a document type of scheme makes more sense where each user has a list of connected users and their own personal atributes, ect...
I'm in the process of designing and planning a new website.
it is mainly a message boards site
I have past experience with MySQL, but I hear many voices (not in my head)
which telling NoSQL can be as good solution as RDBMS.
the main claim for NoSQL is performance. what do you think about it?
so,
I need a scalable database-design technology for my website.
if I go with NoSQL, I know there are couple of technologies in this area
(document store, key-value store etc) . how to choose?
what do you think is more suitable for a message boards website:
NoSQL or MySQL?
thanks,
socksocket
Both SQL and no-SQL can be used for your purpose. The two main reasons to go with no-SQL is if you really have a lot of traffic (and your sql solution is not working performance-wise) and if you have a lot of unstructured and changing data that benefits from being schema-less.
Personally I believe a significant factor for you to consider is maintainability.
If you create anything using no-sql you are going to have less than 10% of the audience for maintaining it when compared to SQL.
It is common for programmers to want to use the 'best' solution technically but not factor in the maintainability and costs aspects, especially when the solution is considered 'simple' by them.
), for your purposes, I think a NoSQL is probably a better choice than MySQL. You should check out like MongoDB or CouchDB, both are open-source scalable NoSQL DBs (and as already mentioned, there are other NoSQL DBs and file storage systems commercially available)
Basically, messaging boards do not really need a DBMS. In a DBMS, query processing actions are slower than in a NoSQL DB and messaging boards can have a high volume of traffic as well as data that does not necessarily have a fixed schema. The flexibility of NoSQL with regard to data structure enables utilizing and implementing sharding, partitioning, indexing and other technologies easily.
Although performance is one of the key elements, this is not a feature in NoSQL, it is more a consequence of design, what I think is THE feature is the flexibility of its data structure and the possibility to store information in a single row avoiding multiple round trips when you work with records that are close related (take a look of this post http://djondb.com/blog to get a better understanding of what I'm talking about ).
For any website which requires to change its model on a daily basis it's wise to choose a DB which can keep up with this flexibility.
I'm a little bit biased because I'm the author of a NoSQL document store but I suggest you to give NoSQL document store a try, you'll be surprise on how fast you can create solutions using that kind of easy to store approach.
Have you looked at Redis (http://redis.io/) ?
You can model almost everything you have in your RDBMS with Redis. In most cases you will get x10 performance, and it is supported by a great and very active community .
I suggest that you detail your needs in the Redis forum, and you will probably get the most honest and professional responses; part of them may suggest that you use other NoSQL technologies on different parts of your architecture
I used to build Ruby on Rails apps with MySQL.
MongoDB currently become more and more famous and I am now starting to give it a try.
The problem is, I don't know the underlying theory of how MongoDB is working (am using mongoid gem if it matter)
So I would like to have a comparison on the performance between using MySQL+ActiveRecord and model generated by mongoid gem, could anyone help me to figure it out?
The article entitled: What the heck are you actually using NoSQL for? does a very good job at presenting the pros and cons of using NoSQL.
Edit: Also read http://blog.fatalmind.com/2011/05/13/choosing-nosql-for-the-right-reason/ blog post too
Re-edit: I found some recent material (published in 2014) on this topic that I consider to be relevant: What’s left of NoSQL?
I don't know much of the underlying theory. But this is the advice I got: only use MongoDB if you run it across multiple servers; that's when it'll shine. As far as I understand, the NoSQL movement appeared in no small part due to the pain of load-balancing relational databases across multiple servers. So if you're hosting your application on no more than one server, MySQL would be the preferred choice.
The good people over at the Doctrine project recently wrote a quite useful blog post on the subject.
From what I have read so far... here is my take on it.
Standard SQL trades lower performance for feature richness... i.e. it allows you to do Joins and Transactions across data sets (tables/collections if you will) among other things.
This allows a application developer to push some of the application complexity into the database layer. This has it's advantages of not having to worry about data integrity and the rest of the ACID properties by the application by depending upon proven technology.
The lack of extreme scalability works for pretty much all projects as long as one can manage to keep the application working within expected time limits, which may sometimes result in having to purchase high performance/expensive relational database systems.
On the other hand, Mongo DB, deliberately excludes much of the inherent complexity associated with relational databases, there by allowing for better scalable performance.
This approach forces the application developer to re-architect the application to work around the lack of relational features... which in and itself is a good thing, but the effort involved is generally only worth it if you have the scalability requirements. Please note that with MongoDB depending upon the data requirements w.r.t ACID properties, the application will have to step up and handle as necessary.
Right now I'm developing the prototype of a web application that aggregates large number of text entries from a large number of users. This data must be frequently displayed back and often updated. At the moment I store the content inside a MySQL database and use NHibernate ORM layer to interact with the DB. I've got a table defined for users, roles, submissions, tags, notifications and etc. I like this solution because it works well and my code looks nice and sane, but I'm also worried about how MySQL will perform once the size of our database reaches a significant number. I feel that it may struggle performing join operations fast enough.
This has made me think about non-relational database system such as MongoDB, CouchDB, Cassandra or Hadoop. Unfortunately I have no experience with either. I've read some good reviews on MongoDB and it looks interesting. I'm happy to spend the time and learn if one turns out to be the way to go. I'd much appreciate any one offering points or issues to consider when going with none relational dbms?
The other answers here have focused mainly on the technical aspects, but I think there are important points to be made that focus on the startup company aspect of things:
Availabililty of talent. MySQL is very common and you will probably find it easier (and more importantly, cheaper) to find developers for it, compared to the more rarified database systems. This larger developer base will also mean more tutorials, a more active support community, etc.
Ease of development. Again, because MySQL is so common, you will find it is the db of choice for a great many systems / services. This common ground may make any external integration a little easier.
You are preparing for a situation that may never exist, and is manageable if it does. Very few businesses (nevermind startups) come close to MySQL's limits, and with all due respect (and I am just guessing here); the likelihood that your startup will ever hit the sort of data throughput to cripple a properly structured, well resourced MySQL db is almost zero.
Basically, don't spend your time ( == money) worrying about which db to use, as MySQL can handle a lot of data, is well proven and well supported.
Going back to the technical side of things... Something that will have a far greater impact on the speed of your app than choice of db, is how efficiently data can be cached. An effective cache can have dramatic effects on reducing db load and speeding up the general responsivness of an app. I would spend your time investigating caching solutions and making sure you are developing your app in such a way that it can make the best use of those solutions.
FYI, my caching solution of choice is memcached.
So far no one has mentioned PostgreSQL as alternative to MySQL on the relational side. Be aware that MySQL libs are pure GPL, not LGPL. That might force you to release your code if you link to them, although maybe someone with more legal experience could tell you better the implications. On the other side, linking to a MySQL library is not the same that just connecting to the server and issue commands, you can do that with closed source.
PostreSQL is usually the best free replacement of Oracle and the BSD license should be more business friendly.
Since you prefer a non relational database, consider that the transition will be more dramatic. If you ever need to customize your database, you should also consider the license type factor.
There are three things that really have a deep impact on which one is your best database choice and you do not mention:
The size of your data or if you need to store files within your database.
A huge number of reads and very few (even restricted) writes. In that case more than a database you need a directory such as LDAP
The importance of of data distribution and/or replication. Most relational databases can be more or less well replicated, but because of their concept/design do not handle data distribution as well... but will you handle as much data that does not fit into one server or have access rights that needs special separate/extra servers?
However most people will go for a non relational database just because they do not like learning SQL
What do you think is a significant amount of data? MySQL, and basically most relational database engines, can handle rather large amount of data, with proper indexes and sane database schema.
Why don't you try how MySQL behaves with bigger data amount in your setup? Make some scripts that generate realistic data to MySQL test database and and generate some load on the system and see if it is fast enough.
Only when it is not fast enough, first start considering optimizing the database and changing to different database engine.
Be careful with NHibernate, it is easy to make a solution that is nice and easy to code with, but has bad performance with large amount of data. For example whether to use lazy or eager fetching with associations should be carefully considered. I don't mean that you shouldn't use NHibernate, but make sure that you understand how NHibernate works, for example what "n + 1 selects" -problem means.
Measure, don't assume.
Relational databases and NoSQL databases can both scale enormously, if the application is written right in each case, and if the system it runs on is properly tuned.
So, if you have a use case for NoSQL, code to it. Or, if you're more comfortable with relational, code to that. Then, measure how well it performs and how it scales, and if it's OK, go with it, if not, analyse why.
Only once you understand your performance problem should you go searching for exotic technology, unless you're comfortable with that technology or want to try it for some other reason.
I'd suggest you try out each db and pick the one that makes it easiest to develop your application. Go to http://try.mongodb.org to try MongoDB with a simple tutorial. Don't worry as much about speed since at the beginning developer time is more valuable than the CPU time.
I know that many MongoDB users have been able to ditch their ORM and their caching layer. Mongo's data model is much closer to the objects you work with than relational tables, so you can usually just directly store your objects as-is, even if they contain lists of nested objects, such as a blog post with comments. Also, because mongo is fast enough for most sites as-is, you can avoid dealing the complexities of caching and generally deliver a more real-time site. For example, Wordnik.com reported 250,000 reads/sec and 100,000 inserts/sec with a 1.2TB / 5 billion object DB.
There are a few ways to connect to MongoDB from .Net, but I don't have enough experience with that platform to know which is best:
Norm: http://wiki.github.com/atheken/NoRM/
MongoDB-CSharp: http://github.com/samus/mongodb-csharp
Simple-MongoDB: http://code.google.com/p/simple-mongodb/
Disclaimer: I work for 10gen on MongoDB so I am a bit biased.
I have huge database (kinda wordnet) and want to know if it's easier to use Cassandra instead of MySQL|PostrgreSQL
All my life I was using MySQL and PostrgreSQL and I could easily think in terms of relational algebra, but several weeks ago I learned about Cassandra and that it's used in Facebook and Twitter.
Is it more convenient?
What DBMS are usually used nowadays to store social net's data, relationships between objects, wordnet?
There is nothing like a Silver bullet solution, everything is built to solve specific problem and has its own pros and cons. It is up to you to decide - what problem statement you have and what is best solution that fits your problem. Whether you use Cassandra (NoSQL) or MySQL(RDBMS), it is all driven from your system's requirements. Below are the inputs that will help you in taking better decision while deciding on database.
Why to Use NoSQL
In the case of RDBMS database, making choice is quite easy because almost all the databases like MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL, PostgreSQL in this category offer almost same kind of solutions oriented to the ACID property. When it comes to NoSQL, decision becomes difficult because every NoSQL database offers different solution and you have to understand which one is best suited for your app/system requirement. For example, MongoDB fits for use cases where your system demands schema-less document store. HBase might fit for Search engines, analysing log data, any place where scanning huge, two-dimensional join-less tables is a requirement. Redis is built to provide In-Memory search for varieties of data structures like tree, queue, link list etc and can be good fit for making real time leader board, pub-sub kind of system. Similarly there are other database in this category (including Cassandra) which fits for different problems. Now lets move to original question, and answer them one by one.
When to use Cassandra
Being a part of NoSQL family, Cassandra offers solution for problem where your requirement is to have very heavy write system and you want to have quite responsive reporting system on top of that stored data. Consider use case of Web analytics where log data is stored for each request and you want to built analytical platform around it to count hits by hour, by browser, by IP, etc in real time manner. You can refer to blog post (http://blogs.shephertz.com/2015/04/22/why-cassandra-excellent-choice-for-realtime-analytics-workload/) to understand more about the use cases where Cassandra fits in.
When to Use a RDMS instead of Cassandra/NoSQL
Cassandra is based on NoSQL database and does not provide ACID and relational data property. If you have strong requirement of ACID property (for example Financial data), Cassandra would not be a fit in that case. Obviously, you can make work out of it, however you will end up writing lots of application code to handle ACID property and will loose on time to market badly. Also managing that kind of system with Cassandra would be complex and tedious for you.
There are many different flavours of "NoSQL" databases. If your application is really like Wordnet perhaps you should look at a graph database such as Neo4j.
I would suggest to analyse your request.
If you are going with more clusters, machines take NoSQL
If your data model is complicated - require efficient structures take NoSQL (no limits with type of columns)
If you fit in a few machines without scales, and you don't need super performance for multi request (as for example in social network - where lot of users send http request), and you don't think you involve saleability take RDBMS (Postgres have some good functions and structures which you can use, like array column type).
Cassandra should work better with large scales of data, multi purpose.
neo4j - would be better for special structures, graphs.
Cassandra and other NoSQL stores are being used for social based sites because of their need for massive write based operations. Not that MySQL and Postgres can't achieve this but NoSQL requires far less time and money, generally speaking.
Sounds like you may want to look at Neo4J though, just in terms of your object model needs.
All different products and they all have their pro's and conn's. What kind of problem do you have to solve?
Huge, as in TB's?