... you either will fall into the trap of having lots of redundant data lying around (and the nightmare of keeping them all updated) or that you will have to re-invent all the JOIN and "reference" logic at the level of your application rather than having it in the datastore.

The data is redundant, certainly, but this falls under the mantra of "disk (and CPU) is cheap so stop worrying about it and scale", which seems to be Google's approach with the App Engine. You are sacrificing space for easy scalability.

As to re-inventing the JOIN logic at the level of your application, OtoDB::MySQL does not (it does do some extra work on ordering, which I cover in the document above). It opts for the redundant data.

Perhaps for some well defined problems the denormalized datastore is faster and more appropriate than a RDBMS, but in general it seems a poor choice.

Here I agree completely. So does Google and Amazon, from what I can tell. OtoDB::MySQL is not going to replace intensive relational applications, like financial or business logic. But if you were LiveJournal, and realize you don't care about JOIN on a specific set of data (users), but you do have the problem of scaling, an OtoDB::MySQL solution makes sense, at least as far as I can see.

A blog among millions.

In reply to Re^2: RFC: OtoDB and rolling your own scalable datastore by arbingersys
in thread RFC: OtoDB and rolling your own scalable datastore by arbingersys

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