

'Slacker DB' shootout: SimpleDB vs. CouchDB vs. App Engine vs. Persevere - snydeq
http://www.infoworld.com/article/09/03/24/12TC-databases_1.html

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tumult
I don't think the author fully understood the purpose of most of the tools he
was dabbling with – he spent a lot more time making jokes about the
differences between imaginary age groups than what the tools enable you to do.
He talked about CouchDB but said he couldn't think of useful things one could
do with reductions outside of counting.. come on. (Plus, you don't even need
reduce to count maps to a key in CouchDB.)

Kind of a fluff piece. Lots of buzzwords. I had forgotten about Persevere
though, so thanks for the reminder :)

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anuraggoel
_"Now that disk space is so cheap and many of the data models don't benefit as
much from normalization, JOINs are easy to leave behind."_

JOINs and data normalization were not created to get around disk space
constraints.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization#Objectiv...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization#Objectives_of_normalization)

For the average web application not running on app-engine like infrastructure,
I believe the following order of questions would be more prudent:

    
    
       1. Do I need a database?
       2. Can I work with a relational database? SQLite? PostgreSQL/MySQL?
       3. Now, do I really need the new hotness?
    

And if you do need the new hotness, may I also suggest Tokyo Cabinet? I am
afraid I can't rate its 'value' on a scale of 10, but I'd say it's pretty high
for a free product.

~~~
cnu
I have been trying out Redis (<http://code.google.com/p/redis/>) which is also
quite good.

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uggedal
Readable print version:
[http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis...](http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/09/03/24/12TC-
databases_1.html)

