Postgresql makes a fairly decent schemaless Nosql document database. It is the only database I can think of that:
- is mature
- is fast
- has an extensive plugin ecosystem
- has ACID compliance
- supports schemaless document storage
- supports relational data storage
- can join across documents and relational data
- can index into documents as well as relational data
- has built-in full text search
Postgres already had most of this. The only thing they had to add to facilitate document storage was a json data type and the ability to create indexes on json properties.
An Example
If I want to store Person documents I might create a table called Person with a json column to hold the document:
create table Person ( data json NOT NULL );
The documents will have a unique identifier _id which I need to be able to query on, so I add an index:
CREATE UNIQUE INDEX people_id ON Person ((data->>'_id'));
Then the query to select a document is:
select data from Person where data->>'_id' = 'A158CCB9-BB68-4FC2-8123-79B32053B2A3'
Better Tooling
A typical application scenario will make changes to multiple documents. We can take advantage of Postgres’s transaction support by accumulating changes and commiting them within the same transaction. If there are no problems then the changes are persisted, but if something goes wrong the entire transaction is reverted, leaving the database in a consistent state.
I have been working on a project I call PostgresDoc to make working with postgres documents easier. Currently it is an F# project but I will add a C# wrapper soon. Use it like so
// accumulate a stack of changes
let julio = { _id = System.Guid.NewGuid(); age = 30; name = "Julio" }
let uow = [Insert julio]
let uow2 = Update { julio with age = 31} :: uow
let uow3 = Delete julio :: uow2
commit store uow3
This approach is great for testing (just make assertions against the unit of work) and is free from many of the awful consistency problems that plague ORMs such as NHibernate and Entity Framework.
Queries are easy too:
let peopleWhoAreThirty =
[ "age", box (30) ]
|> query<Person> store "select data from people where data->>'age' = :age"