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What is NoSQL good for? (programming.dev)
submitted 6 days ago by Colloidal@programming.dev to c/learn_programming@programming.dev
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I’m versed enough in SQL and RDBMS that I can put things in the third normal form with relative ease. But the meta seems to be NoSQL. Backends often don’t even provide a SQL interface.

So, as far as I know, NoSQL is essentially a collection of files, usually JSON, paired with some querying capacity.

  1. What problem is it trying to solve?
  2. What advantages over traditional RDBMS?
  3. Where are its weaknesses?
  4. Can I make queries with complex WHERE clauses?
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[-] FizzyOrange@programming.dev 3 points 6 days ago

I think this is a really good point, but it's also kind of a missed opportunity for NoSQL. The ORM mapping is easily the most annoying thing about using a relational database, and I think it's what most people initially looking at NoSQL wanted to solve.

But what we ended up with is Mongo which solves that problem but also throws away pretty much every useful feature that relational databases have! No schemas, no type checking, no foreign keys, etc. etc. It's just a big soup of JSON which is awful to work with.

I wonder if anyone made any NoSQL databases that avoid the object/table impedance mismatch but also managed to keep schemas, foreign keys, etc.

this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
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