NoSQL system to save relational data

Question

If my data is relational (publishers-authors-books, associations-teams-players), can we use NoSQL system like HBase or MongoDB to store the data?

(I know it may sound like a stupid question but I'm just learning :))

Answer 1

Yes, you can store any type of data in NoSQL datastores. The kind of information you describe should be very adequate for NoSQL.

However, be aware that in a typical NoSQL solution, you would be trading some/many features that are taken for granted in SQL databases, such as transactions , strong consistency , rich queries, ad-hoc queries, etc, mainly in favour of simpler models that can scale horizontally very easily.

Answer 2

One of the Digg engineers working on Cassandra (another NoSQL solution) wrote a very good post about data models and NoSQL (specifically Cassandra).

This may help you start thinking in column oriented data structures.

Answer 3

You can store relational data with playOrm and still do joins and such AND scale that data as well. There are lots of people saying you can't store relational data in noSQL but this is simply not true as we do it today AND we scale view partitioning and Scalable SQL (S-SQL) which is a slight twist on SQL so that we scale.