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Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2011 11:28:19 -0400
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Subject: Relationships Of Complex Documents In Document Databases
From: Ryan Zec <basire@gmail.com>
To: user@couchdb.apache.org
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I have been looking at a number of document databases (RavenDB, CouchDB,
MongoDB) and there are two things about them that I really like and makes me
what to incorporate them as much as possible and that is the schema-less
natural (not that they are schema-less per-say but that it is a very
flexible schema that is much easier to change than ones with RDBMS) and the
fact there is a lot less impedance mismatch when mapping the database data
to code.

There have a been a number of things that I have found that have prevented
me from using a document database because I find I need these things all the
time.  Some of them I have found solutions for like unique fields.  While
document databases don't directly support this feature, a work around that
is acceptable is creating another document with the email is the document id
and then inserting the user if the insert on the email document was
successful however there are there is one big thing that I don't think
document database can provide me from my searching.

That feature is relationships with complex documents.  One of my projects I
wanted to use a document database for is a project management system.  The
issue with this is that there are a lot of places where I need relationships
with large objects (and multiple relationships within one document).  When
it come to something like a task or a user, those are complex documents and
having the document embedded would not be a good thing as data mismatch with
these items can't happen.  Now if I just reference the document then am I
really getting any benefit from using a document database because now I am
probably going to have a lot more queries that I need to run compared to a
relational database.

While I was hopping to have most of my data be stored into a document
database, the more I look at it, it seems like most of the data needs to be
in a RDBMS.  Am I correct in assuming this type of relationship needs a
RDBMS or am I un-aware of how this can be accomplished in a document
database.

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