When to use CouchDB vs RDBMS

user_4890 0
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I am looking at CouchDB, which has a number of appealing features over relational databases including:

  • intuitive REST/HTTP interface
  • easy replication
  • data stored as documents, rather than normalised tables

I appreciate that this is not a mature product so should be adopted with caution, but am wondering whether it is actually a viable replacement for an RDBMS (in spite of the intro page saying otherwise - http://couchdb.apache.org/docs/intro.html).

  1. Under what circumstances would CouchDB be a better choice of database than an RDBMS (e.g. MySQL), e.g. in terms of scalability, design + development time, reliability and maintenance.
  2. Are there still cases where an RDBMS is still clearly the right choice?
  3. Is this an either-or choice, or is a hybrid solution more likely to emerge as best practice?
rdbms couchdb database
7 Answers

Sam you have to take another approch with CouchDB and in general with map or document based database. You can't define a constraint, such a unique, but you can query data to check if that email is used and if that login is used too. That's the right approch, you have to change your mind.

user_2767020
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