CouchDB basics for PHP developers

[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for this link. ]

"If you're a typical PHP developer, it doesn't take a thorough review of past projects to pick out a telling pattern: In most (if not all) cases, you're probably getting PHP to talk to a database back end for all that dynamic data goodness; in 99 percent of those instances, you're using MySQL.

"Now, there's nothing wrong with using a relational database. If you're working with highly structured data with lots of relationships, it's the way to go. You can happily (or unhappily, depending on your familiarity and comfort with SQL) go through the process of working up schemas, normalizing data relations, setting up tables, and all the rest.

"However, every once in a while, you work on a project where you probably think to yourself, "Why am I doing all this work?" The project you're working on contains very simple bits of data or data that's difficult to predict — you might get different data fields on different days or even from transaction to transaction. If you were to create a schema to predict what's coming down the pike at you, you'd end up with tables that have lots of empty fields or lots of mapping tables."

Complete Story

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