[Phpwm] Non-Relational Databases

[elliot at townx.org]

Hello Alex,

On Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:25:16 +0000, Alex Mace <alex at hollytree.co.uk> wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> Has anyone played around with any of the non-relational databases that
> seem to be getting a bit trendy? I'm thinking of things like Apache
> CouchDB, Amazon SimpleDB, Google BigTable (part of the App Engine I
> believe?).

Not any of the "trendy" ones, but I do work everyday with the Talis
Platform, a big old RDF store:

http://www.talis.com/platform/index.shtml

We use it as the back-end for our library catalogue software:
http://talis.com/prism/.

I have to say working with these things is a lot more cumbersome than
RDBMSs: there are fewer decent object to "freaky database" mapping layers,
barring things like Jena for Java. There is ARC for RDF for PHP, probably
similar stuff for CouchDB (I know there's a Ruby library for that one). But
the old fashioned RDBMS just has much better, standardised tool support.
Unless you really think you can't do it with a RDBMS, I'd say adding exotic
stuff to your app. will probably slow you down.

Elliot





> I've only ever worked with or been taught about relational
> databases and I'm wondering what, if any, benefits these could give
> me. I've got an inkling that they're useful for storing and querying
> large amounts of arbitary data. Perhaps something thats useful for
> data mining?
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Alex
> 
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