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...
Related
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!
I'm looking at SQL & NoSQL Databases - namely MySQL and DynamoDB (both at AWS).
I'm building a dating/social network and demos I've built have been using a MySQL Database with around 50 tables for logical separation of data and then using SQL queries (often with joins) to extract required chucks of data to send back to browsers.
I'm moving to AWS and are doing a rebuilt of the system and wanted to know if it would be possible to write a site like this 100% in NoSQL. I understand you don't know the specifics of the site but it could be compared to any other dating/social network like facebook (obviously more involved) or Eharmony/Match Maker etc...
Could a Social Site be built 100% on NoSQL? or would a mix of NoSQL & SQL be move realistic?
thx
It's a very difficult question to answer without a deeper understanding of exactly what features you're after, and what language you are going to be writing the site in. There are lots of different types of NoSQL solutions.
NoSQL databases like Dynamo and Cassandra are Key-Value Stores. They offer a very different set of features than Document Databases like MongoDB and RavenDB. There are many other types as well.
Personally, I would be more than comfortable writing a social media site based entirely on RavenDB. But that's because I tend to focus on Domain Driven Design, and like to write in .Net/C#. It has all the features you would need, like querying indexes, map/reduce for big data jobs, full-text search, and spatial distance proximity searches. You could use their http/rest api if you wanted to program from php or javascript, but their C# client is much easier to use.
Your requirements may be different than mine would be though. I would encourage you to try out several different NoSQL technologies before you settle on one. You may still find that you need a SQL (or MySQL) database for certain things that your NoSQL solution doesn't handle. For example, RavenDB isn't recommended for ad-hoc reporting - so many people set up a separate SQL Server database and replicate data from Raven into SQL so they can provide a separate reporting database to their power users.
The biggest thing to remember is that most noSQL engines (like Cassandra) don't support querying, so that has to be a factor in your design (i.e. many things you take for granted in SQL like JOINs are much harder in a noSQL solution). With that being said, you most definitely can build full-featured applications using a noSQL solution. I encourage you to look into resources available from the many providers out there, like Cassandra, MongoDB, Dyanamo, and many others.
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 am currently working on recommendation systems especially for audio files.but i am a beginner at this subject.i am trying to design database first with mysql but i cant decide how to do it.İt is basicly a system which users create profile then search for the music and system recommend them music similar to they liked.
which database should i use ?(Mysql
comes my mind as a first guess)
it is a web project and also then
with mobile side.Which technologies
should i use?(php,android
platform...)
what are the pitfalls of this
project.
how to design database for system
like that?
Any relational database should be good for storing the raw data like lists of songs, list of users, users' song preferences..
I think that you'll find that a relational databases (and SQL) are not that great for storing the various data structures that your recommender will be constructing. Your recommendation engine will probably creating data that doesn't really need to be in tables and manipulating it for storage in a relational database may just be wasted work.
Just be aware of what you are doing and don't spend time putting stuff into a SQL database if it feels wrong. Maybe look into using a document oriented database like MongoDB.
The recommender that I recently wrote is actually a Java server process that reads in the raw data from MySQL, does all of its work in-memory, and provides recommendation data to my application via an HTTP API. I didn't even bother storing the recommendation data permanently since it can be regenerated.
Go read "Programming Collective Intelligence". They have a number of fine algorithms for recommendations in Chapter 2, "Making Recommendations".
Well, this is a vague question and a half, but I'll do my best to answer:
MySQL is a solid database, and so is PostgreSQL. Both are free and open sourced. MySQL is more widely supported and a little easier to use, but Postgres has some very cool features and functionality that's worth taking a gander at. WikiVS has a good comparison of the two.
Smartphones are having better and better browsers. Use PHP or ASP.NET (whatever you're comfortable with), and then build out a mobile site which looks better on the smaller resolutions.
There are a lot. First and foremost, how good is your recommendation algorithm? Secondly, storing audio files can eat up storage space quickly. What's your plan for scaling? Thirdly, how well do you know database design? Can you design a large, hefty database and index it properly? If not, you need to start reading everything you can on indices and database design. Fourthly, it's a software project, and those always have pitfalls. The best you can do is post here when problems arise and we can always see what the fine people of StackOverflow can do to help.