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I am developing a Discussion Forum for my University. For this to manipulate the data i m using CouchDB as database.

I m finding difficulty in designing the structure of my db, in order to maximize the performance of my db.

I want to discuss what is the good practice of designing a document database.

  1. Either we should make only one database as SQL and make 'n' no. of documents in the database.
  2. Or we can make more no of database in order to flatten my db structure.This also reduce the more no. of documents to be developed.
Piyush Srivastava
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The questions you need to ask are simply this: "How do you want to get data out of your database?"

Database design hinges around the queries to be made, not what is available to be stored.

This is especially important for Document DBs like Couch, since, while it does have a flexible schema, it does not have flexible indexing. By that I mean that because of the granularity of the data, it's quite like that later on, when you need to ask a question that it was not designed to answer, answering that question may well be very expensive. It's much, much cheaper to design your views and other constructs early, when there is little data in the data base rather than later after you have thousands or millions of rows.

RDBMS's, since they tend to have a finer granularity of data, tend to be more nimble to new queries and such later in life. Document DBs, not so much.

So think through your use cases up front, and design around those, and design those early on, it's much less painless now than later.

Will Hartung
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It's hard to tell the right way to approach modeling your data since you don't give much information. Generally though you want to keep as much data as possible in one database as this allows you to index it together (indexes cannot span more than one database).

Also, since there is no schema enforcement in the database, you can create different types of records in each database. For example, there is nothing wrong with have both user information and forum entries in the same database.

Last, you will most likely want to keep messages and their replies in different records. This is an old but still relevant discussion on this topic: http://www.cmlenz.net/archives/2007/10/couchdb-joins

Cheers.

Sam Bisbee
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