NoSql database suitable for long value - mongodb

I am looking to use NoSql database for my applications. I have searched internet and found Berkeley DB, Mongodb, redis, Tokyo cabinet etc. There are some suggestions, usecases which database to use when. Some useful links i find are
http://perfectmarket.com/blog/not_only_nosql_review_solution_evaluation_guide_chart
http://kkovacs.eu/cassandra-vs-mongodb-vs-couchdb-vs-redis
But i didn't find which database performs good when value(in key-value pair) is very big like 1 MB or something.
MongoDB looks good to me because of its query feature. How it performs when you store very big documents.

RavenDB has the notion of Attachemnts. In a document, instead of having a property 1MB in size (usually a byte array), you'd put a minimalistic document with data you want to Map/Reduce on and save that large data bite as an attachment. That speeds up things very well.

Related

ElasticSearch & Mongo

Very newbie question I assume.. I started playing around with ES and MongoDB and I'm trying to move data out a SQL DB as an exercise.
I can't help but wonder, what data would I store in Mongo and what in ES? Can I store everything in ES? Assume big data load, as in price trends.
To begin with, MongoDB is so-called a document store. Key feature of such concept is that is stores schema-dynamic documents:
Each record in a document collection can have a different structure
Types of each records can be different
Document properties (columns) can have nested structures
It's not schema-free, it's schema-dynamic (or flexible schema). To get into the concept, you can find a great tutorial here: https://docs.mongodb.org/manual/data-modeling/
MongoDB is the most widely used document store - please, see http://db-engines.com/en/system/MongoDB.
It has "drivers" for most programming languages, enabling rapid development. You can dive into Mongo quite quickly, there are a lot of tutorials and official Mongo University - a great course for developers and DBAs.
In short terms it supports indexing, aggregations, filters, load balancing, sharding, replications (replica sets) etc. Data is stored and transferred in a BSON format (http://bsonspec.org/).
A good comparison of MongoDB vs RDBMS concepts can be found in this official reference: https://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/sql-comparison/
What is it good for? It enables agile development, where schema can change over a period of time, especially form based data, user generated content, location based data, user profiles and more. It also enables storing large documents (up to 16MB each).
Now, Elasticsearch is not a database. It is a search engine with some great aggregation capabilities (https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/search-aggregations.html - make sure you check out Metrics, Buckets and Pipeline aggregations).
Typical RDBSM is not designed for full-text searches or loosely structured data. Queries in ES can return results much faster than any database (e.g. seconds in RDBMS compared to milliseconds in ES). You need to remember that a key is to design indexes well, and that they will take your disk space.
There is a very detailed article comparing both in regards to performance, you may find it useful: http://blog.quarkslab.com/mongodb-vs-elasticsearch-the-quest-of-the-holy-performances.html.
You can actually use both successfully - MongoDB will store your data, where ES will be used as serving layer (search, aggregations etc.).
There is a big difference between mongodb and ES.
MongoDB is a database which was design in order to store data in it and query thats, while elasticsearch is an lucene base indexer in which you should only index data for searches and should not trust elastisearch. even though you can use store:true in elastic search, it is not recommended and i wouldn't rely on that for important data.

why rdbms cant store unstructured data?and why nosql databases can?

I have read that one of the differences between rdbms and nosql databases is storing unstructured data,I know each nosql database has its own architecture and algorithms,but I want to know why rdbms cant store unstructured data?
and why nosql databases can do that,I will be really thankful if you show me a simple example so that I can understand how nosql databases do that,and what makes rdbms unable to store unstructured data.
Relational databases are based on Edgar F. Codd's relational data model which assumes strictly structured data. The whole SQL language is constructed around this model and the databases which implement it are optimized for working that way.
But in the past few years, there were attempts to add features to SQL which allow to work with unstructured data, like the SQL/XML extension which allows to store XML documents in fields of SQL tables and query their document-trees transparently.
Document-oriented databases like MongoDB or CouchDB, on the other hand, were designed from the start to work with unstructured data and their query languages were designed around this concept, so when working with unstructured data they are usually much faster and more convenient to use.
I read this question totally wrong and thought about the problem totally wrong at first (multiple locale definitions of "structured") so ignore my comments, however, MongoDB does actually store structured data. The Wikipedia definition (which may I say seems to differ across the internet in itself) is that ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstructured_data ):
Unstructured Data (or unstructured information) refers to information that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner.
But that is untrue for MongoDB since it actually does have one:
{
_id:{}
}
Since the _id is always required, as such it has been more accurately said by MongoDB users recently that MongoDB has a "flexible" schema and not nessecarily schemaless which is why most people say it stores unstructured data.
So yes, it does kind of store unstructured data but not totally...
Simply put, NOSQL data stores are hierarchical, variable length, highly distributed file based systems with eventual consistency. The schema is embedded in the data (or in the code but NOSQLs are not schemaless), the columns can vary from one instance to the next even in the same structure, and the size of the columns is not fixed.

CouchDB and MongoDB really search over each document with JavaScript?

From what I understand about these two "Not only SQL" databases. They search over each record and pass it to a JavaScript function you write which calculates which results are to be returned by looking at each one.
Is that actually how it works? Sounds worse than using a plain RBMS without any indexed keys.
I built my schemas so they don't require join operations which leaves me with simple searches on indexed int columns. In other words, the columns are in RAM and a quick value check through them (WHERE user_id IN (12,43,5,2) or revision = 4) gives the database a simple list of ID's which it uses to find in the actual rows in the massive data collection.
So I'm trying to imagine how in the world looking through every single row in the database could be considered acceptable (if indeed this is how it works). Perhaps someone can correct me because I know I must be missing something.
#Xeoncross
I built my schemas so they don't require join operations which leaves me with simple searches on indexed int columns. In other words, the columns are in RAM and a quick value check through them (WHERE user_id IN (12,43,5,2) or revision = 4)
Well then, you'll love MongoDB. MongoDB support indexes so you can index user_id and revision and this query will be able to return relatively quickly.
However, please note that many NoSQL DBs only support Key lookups and don't necessarily support "secondary indexes" so you have to do you homework on this one.
So I'm trying to imagine how in the world looking through every single row in the database could be considered acceptable (if indeed this is how it works).
Well if you run a query in an SQL-based database and you don't have an index that database will perform a table scan (i.e.: looking through every row).
They search over each record and pass it to a JavaScript function you write which calculates which results are to be returned by looking at each one.
So in practice most NoSQL databases support this. But please never use it for real-time queries. This option is primarily for performing map-reduce operations that are used to summarize data.
Here's maybe a different take on NoSQL. SQL is really good at relational operations, however relational operations don't scale very well. Many of the NoSQL are focused on Key-Value / Document-oriented concepts instead.
SQL works on the premise that you want normalized non-repeated data and that you to grab that data in big sets. NoSQL works on the premise that you want fast queries for certain "chunks" of data, but that you're willing to wait for data dependent on "big sets" (running map-reduces in the background).
It's a big trade-off, but if makes a lot of sense on modern web apps. Most of the time is spent loading one page (blog post, wiki entry, SO question) and most of the data is really tied to or "hanging off" that element. So the concept of grabbing everything you need with one query horizontally-scalable query is really useful.
It's the not the solution for everything, but it is a really good option for lots of use cases.
In terms of CouchDB, the Map function can be Javascript, but it can also be Erlang. (or another language altogether, if you pull in a 3rd Party View Server)
Additionally, Views are calculated incrementally. In other words, the map function is run on all the documents in the database upon creation, but further updates to the database only affect the related portions of the view.
The contents of a view are, in some ways, similar to an indexed field in an RDBMS. The output is a set of key/value pairs that can be searched very quickly, as they are stored as b-trees, which some RDBMSs use to store their indexes.
Think CouchDB stores the docs in a btree according to the "index" (view) and just walks this tree.. so it's not searching..
see http://guide.couchdb.org/draft/btree.html
You should study them up a bit more. It's not "worse" than and RDMBS it's different ... in fact, given certain domains/functions the "NoSQL" paradigm works out to be much quicker than traditional and in some opinions, outdated, RDMBS implementations. Think Google's Big Table platform and you get what MongoDB, Riak, CouchDB, Cassandra (Facebook) and many, many others are trying to accomplish. The primary difference is that most of these NoSQL solutions focus on Key/Value stores (some call these "document" databases) and have limited to no concept of relationships (in the primary/foreign key respect) and joins. Join operations on tables can be very expensive. Also, let's not forget the object relational impedance mismatch issue... You don't need an ORM to access MongoDB. It can actually store your code object (or document) as it is in memory. Can you imagine the savings in lines of code and complexity!? db4o is another lightweight solution that does this.
I don't know what you mean when you say "Not only SQL" database? It's a NoSQL paradigm - wherein no SQL is used to query the underlying data store of the system. NoSQL also means not an RDBMS which SQL is generally built on top of. Although, MongoDB does has an SQL like syntax that can be used from .NET when retrieving data - it's called NoRM.
I will say I've only really worked with Riak and MongoDB... I'm by no means familiar with Cassandra or CouchDB past a reading level and feature set comprehension. I prefer to use MongoDB over them all. Riak was nice too but not for what I needed. You should download a few of these NoSQL solutions and you will get the concept. Check out db4o, MongoDB and Riak as I've found them to be the easiest with more support for .NET based languages. It will just make sense for certain applications. All in all, the NoSQL or Document databse or OODBMS ... whatever you want to call it is very appealing and gaining lots of movement.
I also forgot about your javascript question... MongoDB has JavaScript "bindings" that enable it to be used as one method of searching for data. Riak handles data via a JSON format. MongoDB uses BSON I believe and I can't remember what the others use. In any case, the point is instead of SQL (structured query language) to "ask" the database for information some of these (MongoDB being one) use Javascript and/or RESTful syntax to ask the NoSQL system for data. I believe CouchDB and Riak can be queried over HTTP to which makes them very accessible. Not to mention, that's pretty frickin cool.
Do your research.... download them, they are all free and OSS.
db4o: http://www.db4o.com/ (Java & .NET versions)
MongoDB: mongodb.org/
Riak: http://www.basho.com/Riak.html
NoRM: http://thechangelog.com/post/436955815/norm-bringing-mongodb-to-net-linq-and-mono

Is Mongo good for transient storage (high volume of object creates & deletes)?

I have an application that will periodically create a large number (10,000+) of hashes (collections of name/value pairs). The hashes may be manipulated a few times, and then deleted.
Is MongoDB an appropriate choice for this? Are there any obviously-better-suited alternatives?
Mongo is a document database and a bit overkill for key/value pairs. It's strength lies in that it can do ad hoc queries in the documents. If you need this, then that's great.
Take a look at tokyocabinet. This is rumored to be a very fast key/value store.
#jmay: there are tons of potential solutions for this stuff: Redis, TokyoCabinet, MongoDB, CouchDB, Cassandra, HBase... just take your pick.
If you consider 10,000+ to be "a large number" then any of these systems will work for you. I'm using Mongo with systems that have four more zeros.
Personally, I like Mongo because it's relatively quick and easy to set up. Check out their quickstart guide and you'll see what I mean.

What are the advantages of using a schema-free database like MongoDB compared to a relational database?

I'm used to using relational databases like MySQL or PostgreSQL, and combined with MVC frameworks such as Symfony, RoR or Django, and I think it works great.
But lately I've heard a lot about MongoDB which is a non-relational database, or, to quote the official definition,
a scalable, high-performance, open
source, schema-free, document-oriented
database.
I'm really interested in being on edge and want to be aware of all the options I'll have for a next project and choose the best technologies out there.
In which cases using MongoDB (or similar databases) is better than using a "classic" relational databases?
And what are the advantages of MongoDB vs MySQL in general?
Or at least, why is it so different?
If you have pointers to documentation and/or examples, it would be of great help too.
Here are some of the advantages of MongoDB for building web applications:
A document-based data model. The basic unit of storage is analogous to JSON, Python dictionaries, Ruby hashes, etc. This is a rich data structure capable of holding arrays and other documents. This means you can often represent in a single entity a construct that would require several tables to properly represent in a relational db. This is especially useful if your data is immutable.
Deep query-ability. MongoDB supports dynamic queries on documents using a document-based query language that's nearly as powerful as SQL.
No schema migrations. Since MongoDB is schema-free, your code defines your schema.
A clear path to horizontal scalability.
You'll need to read more about it and play with it to get a better idea. Here's an online demo:
http://try.mongodb.org/
There are numerous advantages.
For instance your database schema will be more scalable, you won't have to worry about migrations, the code will be more pleasant to write... For instance here's one of my model's code :
class Setting
include MongoMapper::Document
key :news_search, String, :required => true
key :is_availaible_for_iphone, :required => true, :default => false
belongs_to :movie
end
Adding a key is just adding a line of code !
There are also other advantages that will appear in the long run, like a better scallability and speed.
... But keep in mind that a non-relational database is not better than a relational one. If your database has a lot of relations and normalization, it might make little sense to use something like MongoDB. It's all about finding the right tool for the job.
For more things to read I'd recommend taking a look at "Why I think Mongo is to Databases what Rails was to Frameworks" or this post on the mongodb website. To get excited and if you speak french, take a look at this article explaining how to set up MongoDB from scratch.
Edit: I almost forgot to tell you about this railscast by Ryan. It's very interesting and makes you want to start right away!
The advantage of schema-free is that you can dump whatever your load is in it, and no one will ever have any ground for complaining about it, or for saying that it was wrong.
It also means that whatever you dump in it, remains totally void of meaning after you have done so.
Some would label that a gross disadvantage, some others won't.
The fact that a relational database has a well-established schema, is a consequence of the fact that it has a well-established set of extensional predicates, which are what allows us to attach meaning to what is recorded in the database, and which are also a necessary prerequisite for us to do so.
Without a well-established schema, no extensional predicates, and without extensional precicates, no way for the user to make any meaning out of what was stuffed in it.
My experience with Postgres and Mongo after working with both the databases in my projects .
Postgres(RDBMS)
Postgres is recommended if your future applications have a complicated schema that needs lots of joins or all the data have relations or if we have heavy writing. Postgres is open source, faster, ACID compliant and uses less memory on disk, and is all around good performant for JSON storage also and includes full serializability of transactions with 3 levels of transaction isolation.
The biggest advantage of staying with Postgres is that we have best of both worlds. We can store data into JSONB with constraints, consistency and speed. On the other hand, we can use all SQL features for other types of data. The underlying engine is very stable and copes well with a good range of data volumes. It also runs on your choice of hardware and operating system. Postgres providing NoSQL capabilities along with full transaction support, storing JSON documents with constraints on the fields data.
General Constraints for Postgres
Scaling Postgres Horizontally is significantly harder, but doable.
Fast read operations cannot be fully achieved with Postgres.
NO SQL Data Bases
Mongo DB (Wired Tiger)
MongoDB may beat Postgres in dimension of “horizontal scale”. Storing JSON is what Mongo is optimized to do. Mongo stores its data in a binary format called BSONb which is (roughly) just a binary representation of a superset of JSON. MongoDB stores objects exactly as they were designed. According to MongoDB, for write-intensive applications, Mongo says the new engine(Wired Tiger) gives users an up to 10x increase in write performance(I should try this), with 80 percent reduction in storage utilization, helping to lower costs of storage, achieve greater utilization of hardware.
General Constraints of MongoDb
The usage of a schema less storage engine leads to the problem of implicit schemas. These schemas aren’t defined by our storage engine but instead are defined based on application behavior and expectations.
Stand-alone NoSQL technologies do not meet ACID standards because they sacrifice critical data protections in favor of high throughput performance for unstructured applications. It’s not hard to apply ACID on NoSQL databases but it would make database slow and inflexible up to some extent. “Most of the NoSQL limitations were optimized in the newer versions and releases which have overcome its previous limitations up to a great extent”.
It's all about trade offs. MongoDB is fast but not ACID, it has no transactions. It is better than MySQL in some use cases and worse in others.
Bellow Lines Written in MongoDB: The Definitive Guide.
There are several good reasons:
Keeping different kinds of documents in the same collection can be a
nightmare for developers and admins. Developers need to make sure
that each query is only returning documents of a certain kind or
that the application code performing a query can handle documents of
different shapes. If we’re querying for blog posts, it’s a hassle to
weed out documents containing author data.
It is much faster to get a list of collections than to extract a
list of the types in a collection. For example, if we had a type key
in the collection that said whether each document was a “skim,”
“whole,” or “chunky monkey” document, it would be much slower to
find those three values in a single collection than to have three
separate collections and query for their names
Grouping documents of the same kind together in the same collection
allows for data locality. Getting several blog posts from a
collection containing only posts will likely require fewer disk
seeks than getting the same posts from a collection con- taining
posts and author data.
We begin to impose some structure on our documents when we create
indexes. (This is especially true in the case of unique indexes.)
These indexes are defined per collection. By putting only documents
of a single type into the same collection, we can index our
collections more efficiently
After a question of databases with textual storage), I glanced at MongoDB and similar systems.
If I understood correctly, they are supposed to be easier to use and setup, and much faster. Perhaps also more secure as the lack of SQL prevents SQL injection...
Apparently, MongoDB is used mostly for Web applications.
Basically, and they state that themselves, these databases aren't suited for complex queries, data-mining, etc. But they shine at retrieving quickly lot of flat data.
MongoDB supports search by fields, regular expression searches.Includes user defined java script functions.
MongoDB can be used as a file system, taking advantage of load balancing and data replication features over multiple machines for storing files.