Are there any Design Guidelines for Documental Databases?

Question

Just wondering if there are any kind of guidelines for when you are designing a document-oriented db and I am talking especially about CouchDb.

I know that being schemaless things can take the shape that we want but, are there any best practices?

Thanks in advance! =D

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 25 '11 at 05:55

3

Jan Lehnardt recently wrote up a useful overview of data modeling (I would not quite call it "schema" design as you correctly point out).

edited Sep 25 '11 at 05:55

Özgür

answered May 21 '10 at 07:01

JasonSmith

score -1 · Answer 2 · answered May 20 '10 at 21:45

-1

I don't know specifically about CouchDB, but there is something over in the MongoDB Docs about Schema Design.

answered May 20 '10 at 21:45

Jordan S. Jones

this isn't as relevant for CouchDB. MongoDB requires consistent data schema for indexing, CouchDB does not. The map/reduce phase and normalize any schema-less data in to a unified index. – mikeal May 21 '10 at 18:57
@mikeal, What do you mean with "MongoDB does require a consistent data schema for indexing. "? – TTT May 21 '10 at 21:49
1

MongoDB's indexes are based on keynames which means you can only have relationships with consistent data schemes. CouchDB's map/reduce allows you to introspect a document and emit a normalized index which means the data can be truly schema-less without limiting what can be indexed. – mikeal May 25 '10 at 07:36
Ok maybe CouchDB offers more flexibility but MongoDB will not throw an error when a document doesn't have (one of) the keys that are indexed. – TTT May 26 '10 at 17:55

2 Answers2