Ask HN: Tradeoffs of using a nosql database?

3 points by smtlaissezfaire 16 years ago | 2 comments

I've been hearing a ton of advantages over using the various nosql solutions (primarily couchdb and mongo). What are the disadvantages to these DBs? Data duplication?

_delirium 16 years ago |

One is that they don't support transactions in the conventional sense. They do support some simpler atomic-operation primitives, but generally not for multiple objects updated in the same atomic operation, and not including other fancy things like rolling back transactions.

bbastian 16 years ago |

Well, with CouchDB, you have to pre-define all of your queries with "views". And the first time you call a view, it has to run your mapping function against -every- document in the database, which takes a ton of time.