The “NoSQL” approach: struggling to see the benefits

Document-oriented data modeling is still young. The fact is, many more applications will need to be built on the document model before we can say anything definitive about best practices.
– MongoDB Data Modeling and Rails

ISMB 2009 feed, entries by date

This quote from the MongoDB website sums up, for me, the key problem in moving to a document-oriented, schema-free database: design. It’s easy to end up with a solution which resembles a relational database to the extent that you begin to wonder – if you should not just use a relational database. I’d like to illustrate by example.