NYCPHP Meetup

[Mitch Pirtle]

DISCLAIMER: I'm a certified Oracle8 DBA, so don't think I'm some young
web developer who doesn't know data modeling or relational theory.

Here's my passionate plea ;-)

For CMS/WCM purposes, there's nothing better. I know of a site that is
in the millions of views daily that has nothing but MongoDB on the
backend, and not only is performance great but so is ease of code
maintenance. The performance benefits have been so significant that
they implemented real-time analytics as well - and they don't cache
anything coming in from MongoDB, as there's no need.

For commerce systems, you still have separate "tables" for users,
products and orders. What you don't have is a third normal form schema
with 45,000 tables and a massive performance and maintenance headache.
I've launched a commerce site myself very recently that sustains 900
requests per second. Absolutely sure this would not have worked as
well with a relational engine under the hood.

I'd go as far as to say that the next-generation document databases
are doing a lot to challenge the norms. Remember when foreign keys
were considered essential for data integrity? Remember when a database
was only considered ready when it was fully ACID and ANSI SQL
compliant?

Think again. Part of me hates this transition, because I've spent the
past 20 years really mastering the horse and buggy; but these jet
planes sure are fast, and they do change the game. Just don't try to
ride one like a horse!

-- Mitch