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Show HN: schemafreedb.com - new, dream database service for web developers?

6 points| etirk | 13 years ago

Hello, I'm Eric, developer and co-founder of Xornet, Inc. the company behind our new service, SchemafreeDB. This is a 2nd submission... we removed some obscurity from the original submission title.

SchemafreeDB was designed from the ground-up to enable Rapid Database Development for web developers.

SchemafreeDB's unique combination of features include:

* Creation of free-form data structures on the fly at insert-time. e.g. Simply add an attribute 'phone-extension' to any phone object, without disturbing your existing phone objects, all without visiting a schema design stage.

* Full SQL support for querying across disparate object structures.

* You don't have to worry about issuing UPDATE TABLE on large data sets. In fact, we did away with the entire concept of UPDATE TABLE.

* Support for complex, nested data structures. Objects can contain simple attributes (String, Int, etc) or other Objects.

* Familiar SQL query language.

* Simple join-free, dot-notated syntax (e.g. WHERE $s:person.address.city='Rochester' AND $i:person.income>50000). This is familiar to the ease of working in an ORM, but without the impedance mismatch between in-memory objects and database objects.

* Free indexing. Delivers fast index-like queries without index configuration, AND at the same time delivers inserts at fast no-index speeds.

* Lightweight, consistent, platform-neutral connection library - JSON over HTTP. Access your database the same way from from any network-enabled platform.

We are currently in Alpha.

Please check us out at http://schemafreedb.com

3 comments

order

petervandijck|13 years ago

The obvious question: how is this significantly different from Couchdb and such?

etirk|13 years ago

Several document-based database systems claim to be schamaless, yet when your data demands cross-document relations (esp. many-to-many), something ugly rears its head which usually ends with you performing multiple queries and relating (or JOINing) data by hand. This essentially forces the work away from the locality and fast speed of the database level, and up towards the remote and slow speed of the client-to-database connection. The difference in speed is akin to the difference between registers and RAM, or between RAM and Disk.

The resultant design pattern often ends up a mirror of what you would have done in any standard SQL database, but without the low level optimizations that a SQL database brings to such a pattern.

Additionally, with a non-native design pattern now in place to deal with your data relationships, concurrency issues may begin to surface.

In SchemafreeDB, your data relationship possibilities are essentially unbounded; yet consistent in both design patterns, access patterns and performance.