When should I use an object database?

5
votes

I have been using relational databases for some time now and recently came across a different type of database: object database. One of the products built around this idea had a description: A scalable, "post-relational" database with a multidimensional data and application server for distributed web applications.

This makes me wonder, when am I supposed to use such a database? I mean, Facebook must be using MySQL and it seems to be doing fine and it can be considered a large-scale distributed web application. The same goes for some other web applications such as Twitter and Orkut perhaps. Given that this is the case, when am I supposed to use an Object database?

1
databaseweb-applicationsarchitecturerelational-databaseobject-oriented-database
Twitter dropped MySQL for Cassandra nosql.mypopescu.com/post/407159447/… (can't really answer your question though) – Olivier Lalonde
And Facebook is actually the original developer of Cassandra. – Matthew Flaschen
@Olivier Twitter is still using MySQL for the tweets, they use Cassandra for a some internal things only. See the official clarification @Matthew And Facebook is rumored to have dropped Cassandra completely. See this post. And at the end, both Twitter and Facebook are still using MySQL. – Pascal Thivent
Well Facebook uses MySQL mainly as a key-value-store and doesn't do to much complex operations or joins. Source: infoq.com/presentations/Scale-at-Facebook – Gamlor

1 Answers

3
votes

Object databases work really well when you have deep object graphs (e.g., CAD or finite element models with lots of geometric entities). Doing all those JOINs in a relational database would be prohibitively expensive, but it's natural for an object database.