Is mongodb ideal for storing literal documents?

Question

I'm developing a systen that stores legal documents in a semi structured way. Is MongoDB (or another document-oriented DB) the best option?. Is there any NoSQL type more appropriate for this system?.

Answer 1

You can use Cassandra NoSQL or CouchDB There are many of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoSQL http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Cassandra%20NoSQL

If you need serious integration, older SQL databases can be an easier for implementation

Answer 2

Consider cassandra to be a partitioned row store than a column oriented db (as there seems to be a few variations of those). Cassandra stores data in partitions, and each "row" in a partition is ordered. Think of it as a map of sorted maps. A key to target the partition, and further key(s) to target key-value pairs within that partition. In other words, it's key value pairs sorted by their keys grouped together in partitions, and the partitioned are auto-sharded by cassandra.

This results in some very efficient querying, as long as your schema is geared towards querying. If you know what your queries are, it can be very efficient. What it's not good for is using in a Sql like manner where you store a bit of data only once and query it in an arbitrary manner.