NVSS NFJS 2012 - Day 2

So today I started with a great session from Craig Walls about Spring Data (Templates and Repositories) focusing on integration with RDBMS, MongoDB, Neo4j, and Redis.  He seemed to be keen on Neo4j.  I am still looking into how the very schema-oriented graph database would work for my needs.

It was a very interesting session; I especially like the content on Spring Data Repositories.  I liked the convention of generating implementations by naming queries with method names.  If that is not good enough, or your methods don't adhere to what the Spring Data engine is expecting, you can use @Query annotations to specify the queries that Spring should implement.  This approach seems to still need a JPA provider, so for now, Hibernate will be used by our teams.  I am not 100% sold on the performance of Hibernate under the covers, but it does make implementation easy.

Next I sat through another MongoDB session with Ken Sipe.  I am partial to MongoDB, due to its schema-less approach and it's scalability.  Schema-less is a big departure from what most of us are use to.  I am eager to model one our applications into MongoDB collections of documents. I think that it gives most flexibility with the most web application performance.  Though I am still looking into Couchbase.  I am not necessarily worried about schema-less storage.  the biggest issue would be with data transformation needed to other service layers and other relational data stores.  I think we can manage that with service layers in our application.  I actually see schema-less storage with a schema-oriented services layers to be the best of both worlds.

I am still reviewing the limitations in MongoDB, like 24K namespaces.  Namespaces would include collections and indexes.  I should not bump into the collections limitations, but I am concerned about any limit on the number of documents in a single collection, or for that matter limitations on number of total documents in a database.

Finally, I ended the say with another Ken Sipe session on Web Application Security and ESAPI.