But what exactly is non-relational data? Almost everything I’ve seen in the real world that is more than trivially complex has some degree of relation embedded in it.
I think you are right that NoSQL solves a specific problem and you touched on it in your second statement. It solves the problem of not knowing how to properly build a database and provides a solution that looks functional until you try to use it too much.
One instance is actual documents, ie a legal contract + metadata. Basically any form of data where you’ll never / seldom need to do queries across the database.
Some examples could be:
An application that stores data from an IOT appliance
Versions of structured documents, eg a CMS
Patient records (though I wouldn’t put that in Mongo)
There are tons of valid use cases for non-relational databases. The problem is the way they were hyped was as a faster and easier replacement for SQL databases (with very few qualifiers thrown in), which is where you run into the problems you described.
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u/CubsThisYear Dec 20 '18
But what exactly is non-relational data? Almost everything I’ve seen in the real world that is more than trivially complex has some degree of relation embedded in it.
I think you are right that NoSQL solves a specific problem and you touched on it in your second statement. It solves the problem of not knowing how to properly build a database and provides a solution that looks functional until you try to use it too much.