Let's move forward and take a look at the basics of RavenDB, why it is different, and why the new approach has made everybody excited about using RavenDB. Looking back at the NoSQL databases history, most of them have started as ways to address problems that people have with the relational databases. RavenDB was produced out of the needs and necessities of a better environment. Developers are becoming more savvy every year, with better environments, better tools, and simpler and more straightforward methods for achieving a range of goals.
The benefits of NoSQL solutions depend on use cases. When considering a NoSQL solution, users must choose the appropriate database management system that best suits their applications. An appropriate choice brings best performance or decrease a costs.
Why does RavenDB make managing document-oriented data easier? Here are the main advantages of adopting RavenDB:
RavenDB is written in C#, .NET, and it is easy to learn how to use it. This is a real advantage. Data can be queried efficiently using LINQ queries from .NET code or using RESTful (REpresentational State Transfer) APIs.
In RavenDB, the database schema is no longer fixed, data is stored schema-less as the JSON documents, so the documents can have arbitrary structures and attributes associated with them. Internally, RavenDB makes use of Indexes which are automatically created based on your usage, or were created explicitly by the consumer.
RavenDB is highly scalable and is built for web-scale. It offers replication and sharding support out-of-the-box.
You can use RavenDB in many cases and it is the perfect choice. For example, RavenDB can be used to archive a huge number of documents, it can be used as a content management database, to store orders, inventory, and suppliers in an e-commerce solution. For some reason, there are a lot of real estate/rental people using RavenDB.
But the case that we don't recommend using RavenDB for is reporting. This is because in many cases, reporting requires dynamic data aggregation over large dataset, and that isn't an OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) task, which is what RavenDB was designed for. For reporting, we recommend just throwing that data into a reporting warehouse database (either star schema or a cube) and doing the reporting directly from there.
