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I'm in the process of designing and planning a new website.
it is mainly a message boards site

I have past experience with MySQL, but I hear many voices (not in my head)
which telling NoSQL can be as good solution as RDBMS.

the main claim for NoSQL is performance. what do you think about it?

so,
I need a scalable database-design technology for my website. if I go with NoSQL, I know there are couple of technologies in this area
(document store, key-value store etc) . how to choose?

what do you think is more suitable for a message boards website:
NoSQL or MySQL?

thanks,
socksocket

socksocket
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4 Answers4

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Both SQL and no-SQL can be used for your purpose. The two main reasons to go with no-SQL is if you really have a lot of traffic (and your sql solution is not working performance-wise) and if you have a lot of unstructured and changing data that benefits from being schema-less.

Personally I believe a significant factor for you to consider is maintainability.

If you create anything using no-sql you are going to have less than 10% of the audience for maintaining it when compared to SQL.

It is common for programmers to want to use the 'best' solution technically but not factor in the maintainability and costs aspects, especially when the solution is considered 'simple' by them.

Michael Durrant
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), for your purposes, I think a NoSQL is probably a better choice than MySQL. You should check out like MongoDB or CouchDB, both are open-source scalable NoSQL DBs (and as already mentioned, there are other NoSQL DBs and file storage systems commercially available) Basically, messaging boards do not really need a DBMS. In a DBMS, query processing actions are slower than in a NoSQL DB and messaging boards can have a high volume of traffic as well as data that does not necessarily have a fixed schema. The flexibility of NoSQL with regard to data structure enables utilizing and implementing sharding, partitioning, indexing and other technologies easily.

Lea Krause
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Although performance is one of the key elements, this is not a feature in NoSQL, it is more a consequence of design, what I think is THE feature is the flexibility of its data structure and the possibility to store information in a single row avoiding multiple round trips when you work with records that are close related (take a look of this post http://djondb.com/blog to get a better understanding of what I'm talking about ). For any website which requires to change its model on a daily basis it's wise to choose a DB which can keep up with this flexibility. I'm a little bit biased because I'm the author of a NoSQL document store but I suggest you to give NoSQL document store a try, you'll be surprise on how fast you can create solutions using that kind of easy to store approach.

Cross
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  • first of all, thanks for your response. I'd like to know what are the main disadvantages of using NoSQL? and if you will to share with me, which NoSQL technology you are developing? thanks – socksocket Jul 28 '12 at 19:37
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    @socksocket If I've to do a list, ordered by how important is to a developer and to the business of NoSQL, I would choose: 1. Flexibility, 2. Avoid of complex tables to store simple information, 3. Scalability 4. Performance. I'm working on djondb which is a document store implementation similar to MongoDB and CouchDB, focused on keeping ACID compliant DB with the power of documents and easy to use. – Cross Jul 29 '12 at 03:43
  • btw, I'm not recommending any particular implementation, some NoSQL DBs could fit really well into your problem, so go and give a try to Mongo, Couch, Raven, etc... and if you have time take a look of djondb your suggestions to improve it will be highly appreciated. – Cross Jul 29 '12 at 03:45
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Have you looked at Redis (http://redis.io/) ?

You can model almost everything you have in your RDBMS with Redis. In most cases you will get x10 performance, and it is supported by a great and very active community .

I suggest that you detail your needs in the Redis forum, and you will probably get the most honest and professional responses; part of them may suggest that you use other NoSQL technologies on different parts of your architecture

Yiftach
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