Has anyone used an object database with a large amount of data?

Question

Object databases like MongoDB and db4o are getting lots of publicity lately. Everyone that plays with them seems to love it. I'm guessing that they are dealing with about 640K of data in their sample apps.

Has anyone tried to use an object database with a large amount of data (say, 50GB or more)? Are you able to still execute complex queries against it (like from a search screen)? How does it compare to your usual relational database of choice?

I'm just curious. I want to take the object database plunge, but I need to know if it'll work on something more than a sample app.

Answer 1

Someone just went into production with a 12 terabytes of data in MongoDB. The largest I knew of before that was 1 TB. Lots of people are keeping really large amounts of data in Mongo.

It's important to remember that Mongo works a lot like a relational database: you need the right indexes to get good performance. You can use explain() on queries and contact the user list for help with this.

Answer 2

When I started db4o back in 2000 I didn't have huge databases in mind. The key goal was to store any complex object very simply with one line of code and to do that good and fast with low ressource consumption, so it can run embedded and on mobile devices.

Over time we had many users that used db4o for webapps and with quite large amounts of data, going close to todays maximum database file size of 256GB (with a configured block size of 127 bytes). So to answer your question: Yes, db4o will work with 50GB, but you shouldn't plan to use it for terabytes of data (unless you can nicely split your data over multiple db4o databases, the setup costs for a single database are negligible, you can just call #openFile() )

db4o was acquired by Versant in 2008, because it's capabilites (embedded, low ressource-consumption, lightweight) make it a great complimentary product to Versant's high-end object database VOD. VOD scales for huge amounts of data and it does so much better than relational databases. I think it will merely chuckle over 50GB.