Regarding hierarchical RDBMS

Posted Mar 11, 2010 10:35 UTC (Thu) by gvy (guest, #11981)
In reply to: SCALE 8x: Relational vs. non-relational by bronson
Parent article: SCALE 8x: Relational vs. non-relational

I've met at least two bright examples of non-relational RDBMS which did shine where My|Pg or Ora just would not:

Daylight for cheminformatics just blew off whatever I could even primitively benchmark with mysql/postgresql back then (2001/2002) by *orders* in speed, not even trying to compare the exact problem domain value (e.g. fingerprints);
GT.M (remember MUMPS?) and temporal model users (whether in hospital IT or business) might have a good laugh with "If the data being stored has a life independent of the specific application and needs to be available to new applications down the road, SQL-relational is probably the right choice".
There was e.g. a discussion on sql.ru describing the details of a migration off a "legacy" hierarchical system to Java and Oracle -- which "doubled the performance" (forgetting to mention the need to go dual Xeon 51xx and external storage from something like dual Pentium with SCSI).

Basically, if you have to do things like "this attribute holds a value changing the *meaning* of that attribute", then you just reinvented a hierarchical database where adding another leaf might be less pain and overhead. And you might have wanted to look a bit wider. :)