I’m versed enough in SQL and RDBMS that I can put things in the third normal form with relative ease. But the meta seems to be NoSQL. Backends often don’t even provide a SQL interface.
So, as far as I know, NoSQL is essentially a collection of files, usually JSON, paired with some querying capacity.
- What problem is it trying to solve?
- What advantages over traditional RDBMS?
- Where are its weaknesses?
- Can I make queries with complex WHERE clauses?
Rather than try to relate it to an rdbms, think of it as a distributed hash map/associative array.
What I’m hearing is that they’re very different beasts for very different applications. A typical web app would likely need both.
Yup. And this right here is where I dismiss people that generally say you only need one or the other. Each has a specific advantage and use case and you’ll have the best performance when you choose the “right tool for the job” and don’t just attempt to shoehorn everything into a single solution
Hold a sec. Rolling your own RDBMS out of a NoSQL database is insane. But is the opposite feasible? Wouldn’t it be a simple table with two columns: a key and a JSON blob?
