non-relational-database

I'm going to try and make this as straight-forward as I can. Coming from MySQL and thinking in terms of tables, let's use the following example: Let's say that we have a real-estate website and we're displaying a list of houses normally, I'd use the following tables: houses - the real estate asset at hand owners - the owner of the house (one-to-many relationship with houses) agencies - the real-estate broker agency (many-to-many relationship with houses) images - many-to-one relationship with houses reviews - many-to-one relationship with houses I understand that MongoDB gives you the

I'm building a Threaded Messaging System that will be hosted on Google AppEngine I've modeled it after the technique described by Brett Slatkin in Building Scalable, Complex Apps on App Engine class Message(db.Model): sender = db.StringProperty() body = db.TextProperty() class MessageIndex(db.Model): receivers = db.StringListProperty() The issue I'm having to determining the most efficient way to track the message state for a User. For example is a message read , archived , deleted for a particular user. Here are the solution I have come up with so far. I'm using Datastore+ 's

The latest craze in databases seems to be centered around non-relational databases. Why? It seems kind of counterproductive. For example, it makes much more sense to me to express my data in a relational way (example code in Django + SQL for tables): class Post(models.Model): name = models.CharField() created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_create = True) class Comment(models.Model): text = models.TextField() post = models.ForeignKey('Post') created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_create = True) SQL: create table post (id int primary key auto_increment, name varchar, created datetime); create

I am in the early stages of developing a sports statistics website (ultimate frisbee) and would like to know your opinions if Google App Engine is right for me. I am writing it in Python using Django and have been comfortable with standard RDBMS for years but this site is a long term project and I am expecting very large amounts of data so I would like the "infinite" scaling that the GAE datastore offers. A vast majority of the queries to the database will return very standard results that would make the datastore seem like a logical choice. However, I would like to be able to make extremely

Let's say I'm writing a log analysis application. The main domain object would be a LogEntry. In addition. users of the application define a LogTopic which describes what log entries they are interested in. As the application receives log entries it adds them to couchDB, and also checks them against all the LogTopics in the system to see if they match the criteria in the topic. If it does then the system should record that the entry matches the topic. Thus, there is a many-to-many relationship between LogEntries and LogTopics. If I were storing this in a RDBMS I would do something like: CREATE

I'm new to databases and I've never worked with any RDBMS. However I get the basic idea of relational databases. At least I think I do ;-) Let's say I have a user database with the following properties for each user: user id name zip city In a relational database I would for example model it in a table called user user id name location_id and have a second table called location location id zip city And location_id is a foreign key (reference) to an entry in the location table. If I understand it right the advantage is here, if the zip code for a certain city changes I only have to change