Is there a nosql store that also allows for relati

Question

I am looking for nosql key value stores that also provide for storing/maintaining relationships between stored entities. I know Google App Engine's datastore allows for owned and unowned relationships between entities. Does any of the popular nosql store's provide something similar?

Even though most of them are schema less, are there methods to appropriate relationships onto a key value store?

Answer 1

The relationships in the Google App Engine are only keys to entities that are automatically de-referenced when accessed in code. And are only values when used to filter against. Its a function of the DB Api rather than anything explicit, so the access to the ReferenceProperty will simply perform a query against the referenced model to get access to the object.

If you look at something like MongoDB, the relationships are stored in-object (from what I remeber), but they can also be stored however you want in the sense that you would create an API that would search the joined table for your item in the relationship in a similar manner to who the App Engine works.

Paul.

Answer 2

MongoDB is a document database, not a key/value store. It does provide, however, a simple form of inter-document references. These work more-or-less like SQL foreign keys that are automatically nulled when the referenced object is deleted.

This is adequate for the same sorts of things for which you'd use foreign keys, but it isn't optimized for serious graph traversal.

Answer 3

It belongs to the core features of graph databases to provide support for relationships between entities. Typically, you model your entities as nodes and the relationships as relationships/edges in the graph. Unlike RDBMS you don't have to define relationships in advance -- just add them to the graph as needed (schema-free). I created a domain modeling gallery giving a few examples of how this can look in practice. The examples use the Neo4j graphdb, a project I'm involved in. The mailing list of this project use to prove very helpful for graph modeling questions.

The document-oriented database Riak has support for links between documents.

You can add support for relationships on top of any database engine (like key/value), but it doesn't come whithout work. It all comes down to your use case. If you provide more details it's easier to come up with a useful answer.

Oops, now I saw that the title says "nosql store" and then your actual question narrows this down to "nosql key value store". As key/value stores have no semantics for defining relationships between entities I'll still post my answer.