[erlang-questions] Re: Conceptual questions on key-value databases for RDBMs users

[Edmond Begumisa]

On Tue, 09 Nov 2010 09:29:34 +1100, Scott Lystig Fritchie  
<fritchie@REDACTED> wrote:

> Regarding the labels of "key-value database" vs. "document-oriented
> database", I typically think of KV DBs as considering their value blobs
> to be opaque and doc-oriented DBs as understanding all (or at least
> part) of the structure of their values.
>    * Hibari is KV
>     * Riak is both (the lower parts of the KV store treat blobs as
>       opaque, but both the map-reduce KV framework and the new Riak
>       Search app can parse the value blobs as JSON, Erlang terms, or
>       whatever a Search text analyzer decides to parse)
>     * CouchDB and MongoDB are doc-oriented

Hmmmm,

I guess that's one way of interpreting the terminology.

I'd argue that within the *context* of the original post "key-value  
databases for RDBMS users", one would be talking more about stores like  
CouchDB, MongoDB, Mnesia.

I think that the primary concern for a SQL-RDBMS user like Silas (and  
myself a while back), looking for an alternative datastore would be some  
reasonably powerful querying so one can ask the kind of complex questions  
 from the data that any decent SQL-RDBMS could answer. This would  
necessitate a query engine that can facilitate peering into the structures  
being stored, otherwise I wouldn't see the point in migrating.

- Edmond -

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