Re: [JSON] beating MongoDB

On 2011-03-23, at 17:24, Sandro Hawke wrote:

> [ this is somewhat off-topic, I know. ]
> 
> On Wed, 2011-03-23 at 12:50 -0400, Manu Sporny wrote:
>> 
>> Fundamentally, until there is a free, open source, GPLed triple store
>> that is performant, scales to billions of triples and provides an easy
>> to use API - RDF and SPARQL are going to stay roughly as popular as
>> they
>> are right now. Until there is something to replace the 'M' in the LAMP
>> stack for RDF applications, we're not going to see a change in the way
>> Web developers develop.
>> 
>> For example, our company needs to store roughly 100 billion+ triples
>> per
>> year of financial transaction data. We're currently using a home-built
>> MySQL solution for our storage mechanism, we will probably migrate to
>> MongoDB in time. We have no free, open source choice for storing this
>> information - nobody does. So the idea that the average web developer
>> is
>> backed by a triple store is a terrible assumption to make. The only
>> thing that even remotely comes close to scaling for us is MongoDB and
>> MongoDB speaks JSON (specifically, BSON).
> 
> I don't think we're likely to beat MongoDB at its own game.  The
> problems it has to solve are somewhat simpler.  If someone just needs a
> closed database backend, and they don't need it to do joins, they can
> and probably should just use MongoDB.     (Or Redis or whatever; I'm
> just using MongoDB as an example non-RDF store because you mentioned it
> and I'm familiar with it.)
> 
> I mean, by all means, they should try one of the faster quadstores [1],
> some of which are open source if they need that, but I wouldn't be at
> all surprised if they preferred MongoDB, and I wouldn't try to talk them
> out of it.  
> 
> Instead, I think the advantages of RDF show up on a different set of a
> problems.  They show up mostly when you need to merge data from multiple
> independent sources.   Once people see that working, they'll see plenty
> of reasons to use RDF.

I couldn't agree more.

- Steve


> 
>   -- Sandro
> 
> [1] http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/BerlinSPARQLBenchmark/
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

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Received on Thursday, 24 March 2011 22:26:10 UTC