NoSQL databases have become very popular in last years and there is a plenty of various options available. It looks like traditional relational databases (RDBMs) are almost not needed any more. NoSQL solutions are advertised as faster, more scalable and easier to use. So who would care about relations, joins, foreign keys and similar stuff (not talking about ACID properties, transactions, transaction isolation)? Who would,  if NoSQLs can make your life much easier. But there is a key insight about NoSQL databases – their wonderful achievements are possible because they made their life easier too is some aspects. But that comes with some price – would you be happy, if your bank will store your saving in MongoDb?

However there are many environments, where NoSQL databases shine – especially when there are huge amounts of simple data structures, which need to be scaled massively across the globe and where these data are not of much value – solutions like social networks, instant messaging etc. are not so much concerned about data consistency or data loss, because these data are basically valueless. (Their business model is just based on sharing absolutely trivial data, where one piece can be easily replaced with another and it does not matter if some pieces are lost. Consider – what will happen if whole Facebook will go away in one minute? Nothing! Few people will be pissed off because they think their online profile was cool, few sad that they cannot share their meaningless achievements with so called ‘friends’, but generally considered nothing special will happen and no real value will be lost. People will just switch to another provider and fill it’s database with tons of trivialities and will easily forget about data in their previous account).

I don’t want to create impression that NoSQL databases are useless, they are very good for certain scenarios (and we need to remember that NoSQL is rather broad category, it includes structured documents stores, key-value stores, object databases etc. – each one has it’s particular niche, where it excels), but relational databases are also good, actually very good. Relational model is fairly good abstraction of very many real world situations, data structures, entities, however we call them. And relational databases provide solid tools to works with them. So it make sense to use them in many cases. It might bit more difficult to start with relational database then with schema-less document store, but  in the long run it should pay off. And what is really nice it’s not about one or another solution, but we can use both and combine them smartly and inventively.
So enough of general mumbo jumbo – let’s get to my particular case – I’ve been looking for data store for my new project and considered to try MongoDb this time ( while in past I stuck to relational DBs), however finally decided for PostgreSQL (again) – and I’d like to share some tests, findings and thoughts. Continue reading SQL or NoSQL – Why not to use both (in PostgreSQL) →