Related
I'm hearing more about NoSQL, but have yet had someone give me a clear explanation of how it is to be used instead of relational databases.
I've read that it can't do left joins, so I was trying to figure out how you'd be able to use such a data storage. From reading: Preserve Joins by code in MongoDB it seems like a suggestion is to just make a large table, as if you already did the joins on it.
If the above statement is true, then I can see how it can be used. However I'm curious on how you'd handle repeat data. As the concept of normalizing, helps you remove the redundancy and ensure consistency in the data (e.g. Slight modifications like capitalization, white space, etc)...
Are we simply sacrificing the consistency of the data for scalable speed, or am I missing something?
Edit
I've been doing some more digging and found the answers the following questions useful for clarifying my understanding:
Why Google's BigTable referred as a NoSQL database?
How do you track record relations in NoSQL?
My understanding of consistency seems to be correct from those answers. And it looks like NoSQL is suppose to be used for specific problems types and that if you need relations that you should use a relational database.
But this raises more questions like:
It makes me wonder about real life examples of when to use NoSQL versus when not to?
By denormalizing the data, you should be able to solve all of the same problems that relational databases do... But there are rules on how to normalize data with relational databases. Are there rules that one can use to help them denormalize the data to use a NoSQL solution?
Any examples on when you might want to consider using both a NoSQL solution in parallel with a relational database?
MongoDB has the ability to have documents which include arrays of other documents. This solves many cases where you would have relations in reational databases.
When an invoice has multiple positions, you wouldn't put these positions into a separate collection. You would embed them as an array.
It makes me wonder about real life examples of when to use NoSQL versus when not to?
There are many different NoSQL databases, each one designed with different use-cases in mind. But you tagged this question as MongoDB, so I assume that you mean MongoDB in particular.
MongoDB has two main advantages over relational databases.
First, it scales well.
When the database is too slow or too big, you can easily add more servers by creating a cluster or replica-set of multiple shards. This doesn't work nearly as well with most relational databases.
Second, it allows heterogeneous data.
Imagine, for example, the product database of a computer hardware store. What properties do products have? All products have a price and a vendor. But CPUs have a clock rate, hard drives and RAM chips have a capacity (and these capacities aren't comparable), monitors have a resolution and so on. How would you design this in a relational database? You would either create a very long productID-property-value table or you would create a very wide and sparse product table with every property you can imagine, but most of them being NULL for most products. Both solutions aren't really elegant. But MongoDB can solve this much better because it allows each document in a collection to have a different set of properties.
What can't it do?
As a rather new technology, there isn't that much literature about it. The software ecosystem around it isn't that well either. The tools you can get for relational databases are often much more shiny.
There are also some use-cases MongoDB isn't well-suited for.
MongoDB doesn't do JOINs. When your data is very relational and denormalizing it would be counter-productive, it might be a poor choice for your product. But you might want to take a look at graph databases like Neo4j, which focus even more on relations than relational databases. Update 2016: MongoDB 3.2 now has rudimentary JOIN support with the $lookup aggregation stage, but it's still very limited in functionality compared to relational and graph databases.
MongoDB doesn't do transactions. At least not complex transactions. Certain actions which only affect a single document are guaranteed to be atomic, but as soon as you affect more than one document, you can't guarantee that no other query will happen in-between and find an inconsistent state.
MongoDB is bad for ad-hoc reporting. Its options for data-mining are severely limited. The rather new aggregation functions help and MapReduce can also solve some surprisingly complex problems when you learn to use it smart, but SQL has usually the better tools for things like that.
By denormalizing the data, you should be able to solve all of the same problems that relational databases do... But there are rules on how to normalize data with relational databases. Are there rules that one can use to help them denormalize the data to use a NoSQL solution?
Relational databases are around for about 40 years. Their theory is a well-researched topic in computer science. There are whole libraries of books written about the theory behind them. There is a by-the-book solution for every imaginable corner-case by now.
But NoSQL databases, on the other hand, are a rather new technology. We are still figuring out the best practices. The most frequent advise is: "Use your own head. Think about what queries are performed most often, and optimize your data schema for them."
Any examples on when you might want to consider using both a NoSQL solution in parallel with a relational database?
When possible I would advise against using two different database technologies in the same product:
Anyone who maintains and supports the product must be familiar with both technologies
Troubleshooting gets a lot harder
The sysadmins need to keep an additional database running and updated
You have an additional point of failure which can lead to downtime
I would only recommend to mix database technologies when fulfilling your requirements without it doesn't just become hard but physically impossible. Otherwise, make your pick and stay with it.
When it comes to NoSQL, there are bewildering number of choices to select a specific NoSQL database as is clear in the NoSQL wiki.
In my application I want to replace mysql with NOSQL alternative. In my application I have user table which has one to many relation with large number of other tables. Some of these tables are in turn related to yet other tables. Also I have a user connected to another user if they are friends.
I do not have documents to store, so this eliminates document oriented NoSQL databases.
I want very high performance.
The NOSQL database should work very well with Play Framework and scala language.
It should be open source and free.
So given above, what NoSQL database I should use?
I think you may be misunderstanding the nature of "document databases". As such, I would recommend MongoDB, which is a document database, but I think you'll like it.
MongoDB stores "documents" which are basically JSON records. The cool part is it understands the internals of the documents it stores. So given a document like this:
{
"name": "Gregg",
"fave-lang": "Scala",
"fave-colors": ["red", "blue"]
}
You can query on "fave-lang" or "fave-colors". You can even index on either of those fields, even the array "fave-colors", which would necessitate a many-to-many in relational land.
Play offers a MongoDB plugin which I have not used. You can also use the Casbah driver for MongoDB, which I have used a great deal and is excellent. The Rogue query DSL for MongoDB, written by FourSquare is also worth looking at if you like MongoDB.
MongoDB is extremely fast. In addition you will save yourself the hassle of writing schemas because any record can have any fields you want, and they are still searchable and indexable. Your data model will probably look much like it does now, with a users "collection" (like a table) and other collections with records referencing a user ID as needed. But if you need to add a field to one of your collections, you can do so at any time without worrying about the older records or data migration. There is technically no schema to MongoDB records, but you do end up organizing similar records into collections.
MongoDB is one of the most fun technologies I have happened to come across in the past few years. In that one happy Saturday I decided to check it out and within 15 minutes was productive and felt like I "got it". I routinely give a demo at work where I show people how to get started with MongoDB and Scala in 15 minutes and that includes installing MongoDB. Shameless plug if you're into web services, here's my blog post on getting started with MongoDB and Scalatra using Casbah: http://janxspirit.blogspot.com/2011/01/quick-webb-app-with-scala-mongodb.html
You should at the very least go to http://try.mongodb.org
That's what got me started.
Good luck!
At this point the answer is none, I'm afraid.
You can't just convert your relational model with joins to a key-value store design and expect it to be a 1:1 mapping. From what you said it seems that you do have joins, some of them recursive, i.e. referencing another row from the same table.
You might start by denormalizing your existing relational schema to move it closer to a design you wish to achieve. Then, you could see more easily if what you are trying to do can be done in a practical way, and which technology to choose. You may even choose to continue using MySQL. Just because you can have joins doesn't mean that you have to, which makes it possible to have a non-relational design in a relational DBMS like MySQL.
Also, keep in mind - non-relational databases were designed for scalability - not performance! If you don't have thousands of users and a server farm a traditional relational database may actually work better for you.
Hmm, You want very high performance of traversal and you use the word "friends". The first thing that comes to mind is Graph Databases. They are specifically made for this exact case.
Try Neo4j http://neo4j.org/
It's is free, open source, but also has commercial support and commercial licensing, has excellent documentation and can be accessed from many languages (REST interface).
It is written in java, so you have native libraries or you can embedd it into your java/scala app.
Regarding MongoDB or Cassendra, you now (Dec. 2016, 5 years late) try longevityframework.org.
Build your domain model using standard Scala idioms such as case classes, companion objects, options, and immutable collections. Tell us about the types in your model, and we provide the persistence.
See "More Longevity Awesomeness with Macro Annotations! " from John Sullivan.
He provides an example on GitHub.
If you've looked at longevity before, you will be amazed at how easy it has become to start persisting your domain objects. And the best part is that everything persistence related is tucked away in the annotations. Your domain classes are completely free of persistence concerns, expressing your domain model perfectly, and ready for use in all portions of your application.
I am highly interested in new NoSQL solutions to implement a search engine for a dating site. However because of having a lot of possibilities, I am little bid confused. My requirements,
1) 10 million people
2) More than 8 index (gender, online, city, name etc...)
3) Scalability
Thanks
You wanna go for either mangoDB or CouchDB.
CouchDB scales a little better while mangoDB syntax is a little more familiar.
also it depends what framework/language u use to create the dating site.
i personally would choose couchdb. (u should know javascript...a lot)
Apache Solr is a data store and fulltext search engine that might be useful to you. Solr is rarely mentioned as a NoSQL technology, but it shares many characteristics with document-oriented databases.
Keep in mind that you have to know what type of queries you're going to run before you can choose a NoSQL solution or design your database.
That's in contrast to a relational database, where you can design a general-purpose database based on the data relationships.
With that large of a dataset you would probably be well advised to look at search as separate from data store. As someone suggested, SOLR will index your data for you to search independently of your database. You have 2 problems, data store and search.
ElasticSearch http://www.elasticsearch.org/overview/
Can handle age difference, geographic location, tastes and dislikes, etc. Or a leaderboard system that depends on many variables.
You'd want something that has sophisticated search and aggregation support.
Elasticsearch is a good candidate. In addition to its ability to perform fuzzy, proximity searches (which is something you'd likely want), you'd also want to integrate some machine learning pipeline to constantly improve your matching 'accuracy'.
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 2 years ago.
Improve this question
With the NoSQL movement growing based on document-based databases, I've looked at MongoDB lately. I have noticed a striking similarity with how to treat items as "Documents", just like Lucene does (and users of Solr).
So, the question: Why would you want to use NoSQL (MongoDB, Cassandra, CouchDB, etc) over Lucene (or Solr) as your "database"?
What I am (and I am sure others are) looking for in an answer is some deep-dive comparisons of them. Let's skip over relational database discussions all together, as they serve a different purpose.
Lucene gives some serious advantages, such as powerful searching and weight systems. Not to mention facets in Solr (which Solr is being integrated into Lucene soon, yay!). You can use Lucene documents to store IDs, and access the documents as such just like MongoDB. Mix it with Solr, and you now get a WebService-based, load balanced solution.
You can even throw in a comparison of out-of-proc cache providers such as Velocity or MemCached when talking about similar data storing and scalability of MongoDB.
The restrictions around MongoDB reminds me of using MemCached, but I can use Microsoft's Velocity and have more grouping and list collection power over MongoDB (I think). Can't get any faster or scalable than caching data in memory. Even Lucene has a memory provider.
MongoDB (and others) do have some advantages, such as the ease of use of their API. New up a document, create an id, and store it. Done. Nice and easy.
This is a great question, something I have pondered over quite a bit. I will summarize my lessons learned:
You can easily use Lucene/Solr in lieu of MongoDB for pretty much all situations, but not vice versa. Grant Ingersoll's post sums it up here.
MongoDB etc. seem to serve a purpose where there is no requirement of searching and/or faceting. It appears to be a simpler and arguably easier transition for programmers detoxing from the RDBMS world. Unless one's used to it Lucene & Solr have a steeper learning curve.
There aren't many examples of using Lucene/Solr as a datastore, but Guardian has made some headway and summarize this in an excellent slide-deck, but they too are non-committal on totally jumping on Solr bandwagon and "investigating" combining Solr with CouchDB.
Finally, I will offer our experience, unfortunately cannot reveal much about the business-case. We work on the scale of several TB of data, a near real-time application. After investigating various combinations, decided to stick with Solr. No regrets thus far (6-months & counting) and see no reason to switch to some other.
Summary: if you do not have a search requirement, Mongo offers a simple & powerful approach. However if search is key to your offering, you are likely better off sticking to one tech (Solr/Lucene) and optimizing the heck out of it - fewer moving parts.
My 2 cents, hope that helped.
You can't partially update a document in solr. You have to re-post all of the fields in order to update a document.
And performance matters. If you do not commit, your change to solr does not take effect, if you commit every time, performance suffers.
There is no transaction in solr.
As solr has these disadvantages, some times NoSQL is a better choice.
UPDATE: Solr 4+ Started supporting commit and soft-commits. Refer to the latest document https://lucene.apache.org/solr/guide/8_5/
We use MongoDB and Solr together and they perform well. You can find my blog post here where i described how we use this technologies together. Here's an excerpt:
[...] However we observe that query performance of Solr decreases when index
size increases. We realized that the best solution is to use both Solr
and Mongo DB together. Then, we integrate Solr with MongoDB by storing
contents into the MongoDB and creating index using Solr for full-text
search. We only store the unique id for each document in Solr index
and retrieve actual content from MongoDB after searching on Solr.
Getting documents from MongoDB is faster than Solr because there is no
analyzers, scoring etc. [...]
Also please note that some people have integrated Solr/Lucene into Mongo by having all indexes be stored in Solr and also monitoring oplog operations and cascading relevant updates into Solr.
With this hybrid approach you can really have the best of both worlds with capabilities such as full text search and fast reads with a reliable datastore that can also have blazing write speed.
It's a bit technical to setup but there are lots of oplog tailers that can integrate into solr. Check out what rangespan did in this article.
http://denormalised.com/home/mongodb-pub-sub-using-the-replication-oplog.html
From my experience with both, Mongo is great for simple, straight-forward usage. The main Mongo disadvantage we've suffered is the poor performance on unanticipated queries (you cannot created mongo indexes for all the possible filter/sort combinations, you simple can't).
And here where Lucene/Solr prevails big time, especially with the FilterQuery caching, Performance is outstanding.
Since no one else mentioned it, let me add that MongoDB is schema-less, whereas Solr enforces a schema. So, if the fields of your documents are likely to change, that's one reason to choose MongoDB over Solr.
#mauricio-scheffer mentioned Solr 4 - for those interested in that, LucidWorks is describing Solr 4 as "the NoSQL Search Server" and there's a video at http://www.lucidworks.com/webinar-solr-4-the-nosql-search-server/ where they go into detail on the NoSQL(ish) features. (The -ish is for their version of schemaless actually being a dynamic schema.)
If you just want to store data using key-value format, Lucene is not recommended because its inverted index will waste too much disk spaces. And with the data saving in disk, its performance is much slower than NoSQL databases such as redis because redis save data in RAM. The most advantage for Lucene is it supports much of queries, so fuzzy queries can be supported.
MongoDB Atlas will have a lucene-based search engine soon. The big announcement was made at this week's MongoDB World 2019 conference. This is a great way to encourage more usage of their high revenue MongoDB Atlas product.
I was hoping to see it rolled into the MongoDB Enterprise version 4.2 but there's been no news of bringing it to their on-prem product line.
More info here: https://www.mongodb.com/atlas/full-text-search
The third party solutions, like a mongo op-log tail are attractive. Some thoughts or questions remain about whether the solutions could be tightly integrated, assuming a development/architecture perspective. I don't expect to see a tightly integrated solution for these features for a few reasons (somewhat speculative and subject to clarification and not up to date with development efforts):
mongo is c++, lucene/solr are java
maybe lucene could use some mongo libs
maybe mongo could rewrite some lucene algorithms, see also:
http://clucene.sourceforge.net/
http://lucy.apache.org/
lucene supports various doc formats
mongo is focused on JSON (BSON)
lucene uses immutable documents
single field updates are an issue, if they are available
lucene indexes are immutable with complex merge ops
mongo queries are javascript
mongo has no text analyzers / tokenizers (AFAIK)
mongo doc sizes are limited, that might go against the grain for lucene
mongo aggregation ops may have no place in lucene
lucene has options to store fields across docs, but that's not the same thing
solr somehow provides aggregation/stats and SQL/graph queries
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.