When to use JCR over DB? Guidelines/Best practices?

Hey guys,

I'm pretty new to Jackrabbit (or any JCR implementation) and my only
CR experience was with a proprietary one years ago not offering so
many of the features we have today like queries, transactions,
versioning, etc.

So I am in the process of designing a web store and I'm finding it
difficult to decide what to put in a traditional DB w/ORM versus JCR
w/OCM. For example, think of your typical Product:

id, name, price, data sheets, marketing PDFs, pictures, searchable
meta data, editable CMS type description for display, etc...

Looking at this, it screams "just put it all in Jackrabbit... " The
only things that would make more sense in a DB I guess are id, name,
and price.. but I can't say why, just feels that way. Why both with
the DB at all and just put everything in Jackrabbit, with Category
nodes, Product nodes, etc?

How do all of you decide which system to use and where? What are the
guidelines you all use?

Thank you,

Rob

Hi!

For some discussion on DB vs. JCR see this recent thread:
http://markmail.org/message/lw4m2cjyykmwwi6o

And our classic content model guide is here:
http://wiki.apache.org/jackrabbit/DavidsModel

These two should give you some start, if you have more questions, just ask them!

Oh, and regarding OCM: my personal opinion is that with JCR you don't
need an OCM framework, since the JCR node interface is already a (very
flexible) DAO.

Regards,
Alex

On Sun, Nov 9, 2008 at 12:37 PM, Robert Campbell <rrc7cz@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey guys,
>
> I'm pretty new to Jackrabbit (or any JCR implementation) and my only
> CR experience was with a proprietary one years ago not offering so
> many of the features we have today like queries, transactions,
> versioning, etc.
>
> So I am in the process of designing a web store and I'm finding it
> difficult to decide what to put in a traditional DB w/ORM versus JCR
> w/OCM. For example, think of your typical Product:
>
> id, name, price, data sheets, marketing PDFs, pictures, searchable
> meta data, editable CMS type description for display, etc...
>
> Looking at this, it screams "just put it all in Jackrabbit... " The
> only things that would make more sense in a DB I guess are id, name,
> and price.. but I can't say why, just feels that way. Why both with
> the DB at all and just put everything in Jackrabbit, with Category
> nodes, Product nodes, etc?
>
> How do all of you decide which system to use and where? What are the
> guidelines you all use?
>
> Thank you,
>
> Rob
>



--
Alexander Klimetschek
alexander.klimetschek@day.com