Thoughts from the Wet Coast
The musings of an ASP.NET Developer from Canada's We(s)t Coast

As my frequent readers would have noticed already, I have been diving into NoSQL databases recently – in particular Document Databases.  But why do we need NoSQL databases in the first place.  Surely the relational databases we have been using work fine – in fact they work very well in most situations. 

The problem with them is they don’t always scale very well – and when I mean scale, I mean scale really big – across multiple nodes in a cluster.  I alluded to this in the first post in this series, but as an aside I have decided to explore why in further detail in this post.

In my continuing research into NoSQL databases I needed to find a database to work with.  As a .NET developer I was immediately drawn to RavenDB – a Document Database written in .NET  by Ayende Rahien of NHibernate and Rhino Mocks fame.

A week or so ago the topic of NoSQL databases came up at a discussion at work, so I decided it was time I learnt about this topic.

A few days ago Julie Lerman (@julielerman) tweeted that she had published an article in MSDN Magazine on Document Databases (one of the major types of NoSQL databases) and reading that article started me on my research. 

Most .NET developers, whether we work on the Web with ASP.NET Web-Forms or MVC, on Windows Phone or in the browser with Silverlight, or on the desktop with WPF have worked with some form of Database.

We are for the most part familiar with SQL Server, MySQL or Oracle Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMSs) – and we are used to writing database schemas and database code using some variety of SQL.