"Details In MySQL, our entities are stored in a table that looks like this: CREATE TABLE entities ( added_id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, id BINARY(16) NOT NULL, updated TIMESTAMP NOT NULL, body MEDIUMBLOB, UNIQUE KEY (id), KEY (updated) ) ENGINE=InnoDB; For example, a typical entity in FriendFeed might look like this: { "id": "71f0c4d2291844cca2df6f486e96e37c", "user_id": "f48b0440ca0c4f66991c4d5f6a078eaf", "feed_id": "f48b0440ca0c4f66991c4d5f6a078eaf", "title": "We just launched a new backend system for FriendFeed!", "link": "http://friendfeed.com/e/71f0c4d2-2918-44cc-a2df-6f486e96e37c", "published": 1235697046, "updated": 1235697046, } "

via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document-oriented_database "But if anything I wrote sounds vaguely familiar because you somehow managed to dumb your RDBMS into storing structured data in BLOBs, added versions and timestamps on all records, grappled with minimizing transactions and locks, denormalized data like there’s no tomorrow, or relied too much on a message queue, then time to rethink. Are you using a hammer to polish your china? (Tip: not a good idea, invest in soft cloth) The thing about relational databases, dumbing them down doesn’t create a dumb database that you can scale easily, and doing read consistency on top of write consistency is two problems to solve. It’s still a shared resource programmed in COBOL pretending to be a mainframe from the day structured data would fit nicely in tabular form. Which, granted is perfectly fine for a lot of applications. And insufficient for others."

"The creators of Lotus Notes found a different approach. They built a document-based database system. Each record was a document that had certain characteristics that let it work with the system. Then you could add any amount of fields of any length. And some of the fields could contain multiple pieces of data. This system allows us to add information at any time. If these are customers, our sales force can discuss sailing with Bob and the joys of a large family with Jonathan. And no storage space is wasted." The real advantage of the new system was not saving space. It was because the programmer who could reduce the world to columns was no longer needed. The new developer was someone who could build an interface to allow the information to be entered easily. The people who programmed Lotus Notes had just left jobs as managers and secretaries. They learned how to build applications related to the real world. If it was decided to add a piece of information, they could add it without worrying about messing with the "record size". "

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