Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
From programming to everything else
Let’s have the database models strut down the runway: Relational (SQL): Data consist of rows in tables. Each row has multiple columns. Each column has a fixed type. Queries use filters and joins. Fixed schema is defined separately from the data. User-defined indexes improve query performance. Robust transaction/data-integrity support. Graph (RDF): Data consist of nodes…
Since I started working on AltLaw.org a little over a year ago, I’ve struggled with the data model. I’ve got around half a million documents, totally unstructured, from a dozen different sources. Each source has its own quirks and problems that have to be corrected before it’s useful. When I started, I was using MySQL…