Relational vs Non-Relational Data Modeling - what's the difference

Question

I\'m new to databases and I\'ve never worked with any RDBMS. However I get the basic idea of relational databases. At least I think I do ;-)

Let\'s say I have a user dat

Answer 1

In my experience, the biggest difference is that non-relational datastores force you to model based on how you'll query, because of the lack of joins, and how you'll write, because of the transaction restrictions. This of course results in very denormalized models. After a while, I started to define all the queries first, to avoid having to rethink the models later.

Because of the flexibility of relational db's, you can think about each data family in separate, create relations between them and in the end query how you wish (abusing joins in so many cases).