Good reasons NOT to use a relational database?

Question

Can you please point to alternative data storage tools and give good reasons to use them instead of good-old relational databases? In my opinion, most applications rarely use the full power of SQL--it would be interesting to see how to build an SQL-free application.

Answer 1

G'day,

One case that I can think of is when the data you are modelling cannot be easily represented in a relational database.

Once such example is the database used by mobile phone operators to monitor and control base stations for mobile telephone networks.

I almost all of these cases, an OO DB is used, either a commercial product or a self-rolled system that allows heirarchies of objects.

I've worked on a 3G monitoring application for a large company who will remain nameless, but whose logo is a red wine stain (-: , and they used such an OO DB to keep track of all the various attributes for individual cells within the network.

Interrogation of such DBs is done using proprietary techniques that are, usually, completely free from SQL.

HTH.

cheers,

Rob

Answer 2

One good reason not to use a relational database would be when you have a massive data set and want to do massively parallel and distributed processing on the data. The Google web index would be a perfect example of such a case.

Hadoop also has an implementation of the Google File System called the Hadoop Distributed File System.

Answer 3

If you don't need ACID, you probably don't need the overhead of an RDBMS. So, determine whether you need that first. Most of the non-RDBMS answers provided here do not provide ACID.