« Database Options

I’ve been an ignorant for years, I’ve used hibernate, I’ve listened to DBAs, clients, architects and I’ve ignored all the persistence options available.

My previous post was arguing the need of an RDMS, there are another two DB types missing from that list:

• Column Oriented Databases
• Document Oriented Databases

Hadoop and MonetDB are two “popular” Column Oriented Databases, the first one is modelled on the Google BigTable whitepaper, the second one claims to be the fastest opensource RDMS, I found throught its website a link to the Transaction Processing Performance Council page.

With not that much surprise on almost all the test of the TCP Oracle performs quite badly!

The more interesting database at the moment IMO is CouchDB, quoting from the home page:

Apache CouchDB is a distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free document-oriented database accessible via a RESTful HTTP/JSON API. Among other features, it provides robust, incremental replication with bi-directional conflict detection and resolution, and is queryable and indexable using a table-oriented view engine with JavaScript acting as the default view definition language.

CouchDB is written in Erlang, but can be easily accessed from any environment that provides means to make HTTP requests. There are a multitude of third-party client libraries that make this even easier for a variety of programming languages and environments.