NoSQL Tutorial

Talking to Mr. Strozzi, the main developer of NoSQL, he revealed to me some news on ongoing development of the RDBMS.

The first minor modification you will see at a glance is the version number: kernel release schema has been introduced, so even numbers are the stable ones, while odd ones are unstable (current unstable is 2.3.1).

The major modification is the rel command. It checks table reference integrity before an update/insert/delete, but won't take any action: it only advises you if something will be broken , so you should use it in your program before you do any table operation.

Other minors enhancements are some commands such as insert, delete, tabletoperl, perlencode and tabletom4 that are quite useful in a programming environment as well as on the command line. At present, no official reference for those commands, but comments in the source code will easily let you understand how to use them.

Mr. Carlo Strozzi told me that the next stable release, 2.4.0, will be available around November of 1999.

NoSQL is a great database system for web-based applications, in which reading occurs much more than writing. I recommend it also for full-text searching and in those applications where ASCII tables may be handy.

For more information have a look at the official web page http://www.mi.linux.it/People/carlos/nosql/ or subscribe to the mailing list by sending a message to noseequel@mi.linux.it with the words subscribe noseequel in the Subject: line of the message.

I would like to thank the NoSQL creator, Carlo Strozzi, for being supportive of me in writing this article; Maurizio Sartori, who gave me some hints; Giovanni Granata, Andrea Bortolan and all the people who have encouraged me to go on researching.

All listings referred to in this article are available by anonymous download in the file ftp.linuxjournal.com/pub/lj/listings/issue67/3294.tgz.