The Daily WTF

Relational Databases and No-SQL Databases take two key different philosophies, by and large. No-SQL is hard to talk about in broad terms, as it’s mostly a set of unrelated technologies all solving the data storage problem in different ways. But we can still make some broad generalizations.

In No-SQL-land, we mostly store data the way we plan to query it. Ad-hoc queries are likely a bad choice, if they’re even allowed. In RDBMSes, we store data according to a platonic ideal of normal forms, driven by the data in our domain. We can query the data however we like, using a language that only declares the data we want, not how to get it. Indexes and views and other behind-the-scenes structures make the query efficient.

Neither approach is wrong or bad or better, they are tuned to different ways of thinking about the problem. But the “invisible performance” of RDBMSes

To read the full article click on the 'post' link at the top.