The fact that a lot of relational databases now offer document storage does lend credence to the idea, but at the same time you lose so much when you only have document storage

[–] ThunderComplex@lemmy.today 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

But if you’ve planned your app through and know beforehand you don’t need relational data, you can skip the overhead of a RDBMS.
At least that’s what I would say if I hadn’t been in this exact situation and it later turned out we do need relational data so we had relational documents.
Also working with MongoDB without ODM is pure pain.

[–] Croquette@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Side tracking here : to me, it seems like every DB is relational, no?

What use case would a DB used and not be relational? With my minimal experience in DB, I haven't seen any other use cases than a relational DB.

[–] count_dongulus@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Cache-like storage, private user-specific data, blobby or otherwise schemaless data. Stuff like that. But IMO it's a matter of time until you find a need to operate against this data relationally, and then you regret using document storage. I've made this mistake twice now and do not intend to make it again. I now consider document storage architecture to be a performance optimization with significant tradeoffs, and not a choice to be made by default for nearly any scenario.

[–] Croquette@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago

My reason asking is because there are other scheme I feel are more adequate for non relational data, but this isn't my domain and I barely dabbled in that, so that's worth absolutely nothing.

But your point about the data being used later makes a lot of sense and I didn't think about that. Down the road, someone will ask you to create links to your data and if you already have a DB, then you don't have to change the whole infrastructure to accommodate that. You can create new schemes and already have a somewhat functional access to it.

Thanks for the input.