Question

When is it a good idea to use more than one DBMS? What are the possible repercussions, and how do you decide when to do so?

I’m currently building an application which runs an analysis on our users’ websites and stores it. This allows me to analyze all the data and give them analytics.

Since the data collected from each site is static and varies greatly from site to site, CouchDB seemed like a great fit. But in order to create this system, I’d need to build a user account system which couch is quite horrible at (reserving names, emails, etc has all sorts of problems).

My first thought was to use MySQL to handle the user accounts and CouchDB for the massive amounts of data. Essentially, trying to use a hammer for a nail and a screwdriver for a screw.

Is this a time when more than one DBMS is a good idea?

Answer 1

I don’t see anything wrong with using MySQL for users accounts and CouchDB for crawled information.

For the users, you might even consider something simpler, like GDBM