By the way, if someone gives this a try on a VM, I wrote an blog post about it here: http://thinkingonthinking.com/A-Data-Platform-in-15-minutes/
ArangoDB
21–30 of 69 posts
Re: ArangoDB
#22> As a relational database user we are used to treat the database as stupid and mainly use it to save and retrieve data. ArangoDB lets you extend the database using Javascript (production ready) and Mruby (experimental). ?!? A common complaint against relational database people are having "too much" logic in the database. (I clearly don't agree, using store procedures and custom extensions ;P.)
Yet, if you have to rollout a database server and an application server, it can be quite some overhead for certain kind of applications. I think this data-layer on top of the data store is especially interesting for e.g. backends in a network world, where your data is distributed, or e.g. when you need to aggregate data from multiple sources. Or, what use case is your comment about?
IMHO nowadays quite a lot of logic is moved into the front-end (for example "single web application"). In these cases you only need to provide some API in the back-end. But normally you need a bit more then "just" the data:
- some access control (e. g. sessions) - compute some fields (e. g. "age" derived from "birthday") - combine and filter data before transfering it the client (e. g. for graph traversals)
Re: ArangoDB
#23I like that they're sufficiently ignorant of MongoDB's implementation to misattribute the primary cause of excessive space usage. Gives me confidence trust them with my data.
The big advantage of ArangoDB with respect to memory/disk
usage is that despite the Schema-less-ness, the database
automatically recognises common "shapes" of the documents
in a collection and thus usually does not have to store all
attribute names many times. In addition, the possibility
of transactions makes it less necessary to keep many old
revisions of documents, in comparison to for example
MongoDB.
Re: ArangoDB
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
To name just a few: - being relaxed about schemas: no more long-running ALTER TABLE commands, no more up-front schema definitions that waste time when doing proof-of-concepts etc. - being friendly to variable and hierarchical data: no more entity-attribute-value patterns and necessity to store JSON etc. as BLOBs - integration of scripting languages such as JavaScript, so you can have one language for the full stack i…
MemSQL relational database has extensive support for JSON and online ALTER TABLE. Indexes can be created on fields within JSON documents for faster access. Online ALTER TABLE doesn't take any long running lock, so it can run in the background without affecting your queries.
I think it's not to say that no relational databases has any of these features.
But I think it's more exceptional than the rule.
Relational databases are primarily designed for relations. And saving your objects as documents simply is a different model.
That doesn't mean one is better than the other, it's two alternative ways of achieving things.
Re: ArangoDB
#25What I like on ArangoDB is the speed of development, as well as its native support for building RESTful interfaces. Last but not least, it is open-source!
Building a REST interface with access to your data is easy thanks to ArangoDB's Foxx framework. You can implement all your backend code in JavaScript and upload to the server.
Thus you can do any sort of preprocessing on the server and make that available to frontends. And it's easy to integrate with a front-end because it's all about passing JSON around via HTTP.
Re: ArangoDB
#26I have tried to run ArangoDB under Node.js had some little successes, but in general their claim that they have drivers for many platforms is far from reality. Also why not to release node.js binary drivers instead of pushing people to use foxx. Also simple browsable docs would be nice instead of chunked documents covering hell knows what. Finding link to their query language was a big hassle :) Also their graph traversing is still in infancy as I understand.
Re: ArangoDB
#27What I particularly like is the functionality to process graphs and explore them interactively in the browser. This has been added in some recent version, and it makes working with graphs a lot easier than before.
Re: ArangoDB
#28I have a feeling, tell me if you share it. "Wouldn't it be cool to have a multipurpose database which we would be able to query with a language, but not SQL, because SQL sucks, for some reason.". Put it differently, what does ArangoDB, MongoDB, whateverDB bring that relational databases didn't bring 30 years ago?
NOSQL databases in general (and multi-model databases like ArangoDB in particular) offer a greater flexibility in the choice of your data structures than traditional relational
databases do. Furthermore, you can configure exactly the right compromise for your application between ACID and eventual consistency, and consistency/scalability.
Re: ArangoDB
#29I'm really excited about the look of this. Being a big fan of Mongo et al. for the structurelessness I also sometimes miss the graph-like structure that you can easily create with SQL. Arango looks cool. I shall try it :)
There is a screencast by McHacki about the graph explorer he wrote: https://www.arangodb.org/2013/11/29/visualize-graphs-screenc...
Re: ArangoDB
#30I have tried to run ArangoDB under Node.js had some little successes, but in general their claim that they have drivers for many platforms is far from reality. Also why not to release node.js binary drivers instead of pushing people to use foxx. Also simple browsable docs would be nice instead of chunked documents covering hell knows what. Finding link to their query language was a big hassle :) Also their graph trav…
I would call
https://www.arangodb.org/manuals/current/UserManual.html
a browsable doc (3 clicks from the main page). And a further click fires up the chapter about AQL...