Bioinformatics is another application area where document-oriented databases have been used long before it was fashionable. For example, much of the data at the NCBI is stored in blobs as ASN.1 (which predated JSON by about two decades...)
One thing I don't yet understand is the big revolutionary deal about the NoSQL systems vs. storing one's hierarchical documents in blobs in an SQL database or BDB. At the end of the the day, I'm not sure that there is any magic - B-trees are B-trees, joins are joins, and disk seeks are slow.
One thing I don't yet understand is the big revolutionary deal about the NoSQL systems vs. storing one's hierarchical documents in blobs in an SQL database or BDB. At the end of the the day, I'm not sure that there is any magic - B-trees are B-trees, joins are joins, and disk seeks are slow.