5 ms·

It's not really fair to call it a variant of Mongo's approach, OrientDB is an SQL powered, NoSQL document-graph database which can model relationships without r

by phpnode 12y ago

It's not really fair to call it a variant of Mongo's approach, OrientDB is an SQL powered, NoSQL document-graph database which can model relationships without requiring joins. It's quite different from Mongo in many ways. Arguably OrientDB is the only data store on the market which actually matches the web's data model - Documents + Links.

porker 12y ago
So does that make it similar to Neo4j? Or is this more of a hybrid document database with graph capabilities?
- phpnode 12y ago
  it's also quite different from Neo4j which is a graph only database and is poor at representing normal documents. Neo4j is also very expensive if you want to use it in a cluster, whereas OrientDB imposes no such restrictions. Orient is definitely a hybrid - it was a document database before it became a document-graph database, but I believe it can still do everything that n4j can. One of the nicest things about it is that it is object oriented - you can define classes and then extend them, something you cannot do in mongo or any RDBMS that I know of. This makes it very simple to use, because the database structure can accurately reflect your application class structure, without any need for leaky abstractions such as ActiveRecord.
  - kolev 12y ago
    Nice! I'll definitely look into it in my next project.
  - dkersten 12y ago
    I'd say its a document database with direct links between documents, which can be quickly and easily traversed like a graph database. The graph API that OrientDB exposes (the TinkerPop api, basically) seems to be built almost as a convention of which links should exist, on top of the document database. OrientDB is very flexible and powerful because of this: representing your data as linked documents feels really natural. I've been using RethinkDB lately, and I love it, but having used OrientDB previously, I find the lack of direct links between documents makes for complex and awkward nested queries. I'll continue to happily use RethinkDB, but I'm also eagerly watching OrientDB's progress and expect I'll be using it some more soon.
mwexler 12y ago
While in some ways quite different from Mongo, it's also used for many of the same purposes. Hence my comment, and hence the article I referenced. The goal of my comment, btw, was to provide some context for the top link, which didn't really describe what the product was; I didn't intend to have anyone think I was disparaging either product. OrientDB can do some things that Mongo cannot (as you mention, SQL access, and the great linking), but when I have seen Orient used, it's in an almost interchangeable way to how one would use Mongo (ie, folks not using the linking and leveraging the SQL just to ease querying). So, variant may not be the right word, but it's an open source NoSQL document oriented datastore, like Mongo, with the additional features you refer to which, for some use cases, make it a superior offering.

by phpnode 12y ago

porker 12y ago

So does that make it similar to Neo4j? Or is this more of a hybrid document database with graph capabilities?

phpnode 12y ago
it's also quite different from Neo4j which is a graph only database and is poor at representing normal documents. Neo4j is also very expensive if you want to use it in a cluster, whereas OrientDB imposes no such restrictions. Orient is definitely a hybrid - it was a document database before it became a document-graph database, but I believe it can still do everything that n4j can. One of the nicest things about it is that it is object oriented - you can define classes and then extend them, something you cannot do in mongo or any RDBMS that I know of. This makes it very simple to use, because the database structure can accurately reflect your application class structure, without any need for leaky abstractions such as ActiveRecord.
- kolev 12y ago
  Nice! I'll definitely look into it in my next project.
- dkersten 12y ago
  I'd say its a document database with direct links between documents, which can be quickly and easily traversed like a graph database. The graph API that OrientDB exposes (the TinkerPop api, basically) seems to be built almost as a convention of which links should exist, on top of the document database. OrientDB is very flexible and powerful because of this: representing your data as linked documents feels really natural. I've been using RethinkDB lately, and I love it, but having used OrientDB previously, I find the lack of direct links between documents makes for complex and awkward nested queries. I'll continue to happily use RethinkDB, but I'm also eagerly watching OrientDB's progress and expect I'll be using it some more soon.

mwexler 12y ago

While in some ways quite different from Mongo, it's also used for many of the same purposes. Hence my comment, and hence the article I referenced. The goal of my comment, btw, was to provide some context for the top link, which didn't really describe what the product was; I didn't intend to have anyone think I was disparaging either product. OrientDB can do some things that Mongo cannot (as you mention, SQL access, and the great linking), but when I have seen Orient used, it's in an almost interchangeable way to how one would use Mongo (ie, folks not using the linking and leveraging the SQL just to ease querying). So, variant may not be the right word, but it's an open source NoSQL document oriented datastore, like Mongo, with the additional features you refer to which, for some use cases, make it a superior offering.