this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
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What is NoSQL good for? (programming.dev)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
21 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I’m versed enough in SQL and RDBMS that I can put things in the third normal form with relative ease. But the meta seems to be NoSQL. Backends often don’t even provide a SQL interface.

So, as far as I know, NoSQL is essentially a collection of files, usually JSON, paired with some querying capacity.

  1. What problem is it trying to solve?
  2. What advantages over traditional RDBMS?
  3. Where are its weaknesses?
  4. Can I make queries with complex WHERE clauses?
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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)

A place where this type of DB really shines is in messaging. For example Discord uses NoSQL. Each message someone sends is a row, but each message can have reactions made on it by other users. In a SQL database there would be 2 tables, one for messages and one for reactions with a foreign key to the message. But at the scale of Discord they can't use a single SQL server which means you can't really have 2 tables and do a join to find reactions on a message. Obviously you could shard the databases. But in NoSQL you just lookup the message and the reactions are just stored alongside it, not in another table, making the problem simpler.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

Right, and you’d never do a search for messages with a particular reaction, so there’s no functionality loss is this use case.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

It's not really messaging that's the differentiator here - it's scale (specifically write scale). If you can't have a single master database then sure you might need NoSQL. But you almost certainly aren't anywhere near that scale. Giant sites like Stackoverflow and Shopify aren't.