Document Stores

When should you choose MongoDb, CouchDB or RavenDB? Ideally, these three NoSQL document stores could be clearly positioned so that any user need would fall neatly into one of the three domains. But hey, this is real life. MongoDB, CouchDB and RavenDB have their strengths and weaknesses, but they also overlap in some situations. One reason for this is the ... Read More »

It was only a matter of time. With the wave of enthusiasm for NoSQL databases and document store databases in particular, big hitters in the software industry had to come out with their own offering. Microsoft was no exception. However, the way that the vendor has approached the NoSQL market differentiates its solution – Azure DocumentDB or ADB for short ... Read More »

Built for query speed and flexibility, RavenDB is designed as a document store into which “you can just dump all your objects.” The driving forces behind RavenDB are Oren Eini (aka Ayende Rahien) and the company Hibernating Rhinos. A key design goal was to “make it a joy to develop applications because (RavenDB) gets out of your way.” RavenDB is ... Read More »

Apache CouchDB (or just CouchDB) takes database technology to the Internet, even using the standard HTTP web protocol for reading and writing data. CouchDB is also designed to handle huge quantities of information with little structure while remaining highly scalable and reliable.   The name ‘Couch’ is an acronym formed from ‘Cluster of unreliable commodity hardware’.  Following its first release ... Read More »

A Little Background on MongoDB MongoDB is a child of cloud computing, where boundaries between systems no longer exist and everything is infinitely scalable, or almost. The derivation of the name ‘MongoDB’ from ‘humongous’ already gives you a strong hint about what kind of data store you’re dealing with. Its inventor, the 10gen Company, began building MongoDB in 2007. A version ... Read More »

How do you store and retrieve different kinds of documents in traditional databases that use fixed data schemas? The answer is ‘with difficulty’. Traditional SQL or relational databases have rigidly defined ways of organizing their data. Once the schema is in place, any application using that database can only add or retrieve records that match that schema. However, another approach ... Read More »