by Mark Ramm-Christensen for EuroPython 2011
To Relate or Not to Relate, that is the question raised by the NoSQL movement. There is a lot of buzz about Couch, Casandra, MongoDB, and other non relational databases, and at the same time there are decades of hard work that’s gone into optimizing databases built around the relational model.
I would actually argue that there is no such thing as a NoSQL database – there are a variety of compelling options to relational database – each of which have different features and different performance characteristics. So no one-sized fits all comparison will do. So, I’ll try to outline a general taxonomy for persistence mechanisms, and then proceed to comparing relational DB’s to their new friends in practice.
The talk will contain quite a few stories from the trenches with CouchDB, MongoDB, MySQL, Postgres, Tokyo Cabinet, ZODB, and other databases, and will help you think about the data storage needs of your applications in new ways.
