InfoWorld: Things Never To Do With A Relational Database | Hacker News Reader

InfoWorld: Things Never To Do With A Relational Database

osintegrators.com

Meh, maybe at scale. I'd say you'd be better off bunging everything in your db at first, and then extracting bits into more specialised data stores based on testing and real-world performance data.

To take one example from there - storing images in your db - this might actually be fine if you have a cache in front of your app servers, since your db only takes the hit once and then nginx/varnish serves the request after that.

Doing replication, versioning and backup for postgresql across a bunch of app servers is fairly straightforward. If all of a sudden you're doing it for postgresql AND mongodb AND lucene - and keeping all those backups in sync with each other - it gets a lot harder, at least without downtime.

Nosql, lucene etc are great tools, but often they're premature optimization. Make it work first using the simplest tools you have, then add complexity to improve performance only where and when required.

First off, if you're writing granny's addressbook it doesn't matter what you use. RDBMS, NoSQL, filesystem, it will work, who cares. I assume that this is at scale. It is a perspective of bill rates I guess :-) Not many grannies hire me to write addressbook apps :-)

Secondly, prototyping your straight JQuery/HTML to MongoDB or Couchbase 2.0 is SIMPLER than to the RDBMS where you must do XML transform first.

Search in RDBMS with ORs and LIKEs is hard and not a good idea for the RDBMS or your middle tier or your user (reduced capabilities with more complexity).

Storing images in the DB vs say a clustered FS makes everything from replication to performance to scalability. Get a few TB of BLOBs and tell me this is a good idea.

Very nice. I laughed to myself over "Search", remembering an absurdly complicated query I once wrote to do a search against an Oracle table.

Ending up with a dynamically generated query which got really long depending on how many spaces you entered... smh

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