SQLite-powered NoSQL Key/Value Store?
For a while I've been keeping an eye on the whole NoSQL movement. Not because I need a highly-scalable storage solution, but rather because I'm interested in storing arbitrary documents in a database and being able to retrieve them easily enough.
I really enjoyed this article on igvita.com: I didn't know about the possibility of having schema-free tables in MySQL, and while I was delighted of the discovery, I wasn't too pleased by the fact that SQLite doesn't support anything like that...
Why SQLite? Well, because I like embeddable, standalone and cross-platform databases, that's all.
Anyhow, I started reading this question which led me to this page, so I convinced myself that it is possible to create a key/value store using SQLite as a backend. The next thing was obviously a proof of concept, so I armed myself with Sequel and came up with this:
The idea is simple:
- a single table (artifacts) containing your (YAML-serialized) documents, each with its own SHA2 primary key
- n tables, one for each field of the document you want to be able to query
- some methods to create, retrieve, update and delete records, keeping everything else sync'ed
Of course this is just a proof of concept, but it can be done. Now the question is: do we really need anything like this? Comments are more than welcome.
