Use cases for NoSQL [closed]

Just promise yourself that you will never try to map a relational data model to a NoSQL database like MongoDB or CouchDB... This is the most common mistake developers make when evaluating emerging tech.

That approach is analogous to taking a car and trying to use it to pull your cart down the road like a horse.

It's a natural reaction due to everyone's experience of course, but the real value in using a document database is being able to simplify your datamodel and minimize your suffering as a developer. Your codebase will shrink, your bugs will be fewer and easier to find, performance is going to be awesome, and scale will be much simpler.

As a Joomla founder I'm biased :-) but coming from the CMS space, something like MongoDB is a silver bullet as content maps very naturally to document systems.

Another great case for MongoDB is real-time analytics, as MongoDB has very strong performance and scale particularly regarding concurrency. There are case studies at the MongoDB.org website that demonstrate those attributes.

I agree with the notion that each database has its own aims and use cases; take the purpose of each database for evaluation accordingly.

Some great use-cases - for MongoDB anyway - are mentioned on the MongoDB site. The examples given are real-time analytics, Logging and Full Text search. These articles are all well worth a read http://www.mongodb.com/use-cases

There's also a great write-up on which NoSQL database is best suited to which type of project: http://kkovacs.eu/cassandra-vs-mongodb-vs-couchdb-vs-redis

I'd suggest this article by Rick Cattell about miscellaneous data stores (a.k.a. NoSQL), their differences and some of their use-cases: http://www.cattell.net/datastores/index.html