Question

I have a Rails app (running 3.2.2) and I want to cache my users’ Facebook friends so that I can access in my application faster than querying the Facebook Graph API every single time.

I’m currently using ActiveRecord with MySQL (though I want to switch to DataMapper at some point).

I feel like a document store like MongoDB might work better here but I don’t have much experience with NoSQL. Or should I just store them in a MySQL table called user_fb_friends, and just store user_id | facebook_id for each user’s friends? Any pros and or cons to having two separate database stores?

Anyone have any insight?

Answer 1

MySQL can handle the job, although if you don’t need to join with any other data, you may be better off looking at Redis which is dead simple and incredibly fast.