• Victor@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    You can make an unstructured database? I thought the S in SQL stood for “structured”, that it was built into the language itself or something.

    • hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 months ago

      Database is organized collection of data, so a disk full of porn in different formats from json to mp4 can be a database, as long as it’s organized in some way

      • Victor@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        as long as it’s organized in some way

        Right? Organized, structured, same thing, or? A database can’t have no structure, right? I don’t even know how one would create such a database.

        • NicolaHaskell@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          At a certain level all data is a pair (some name, blob of bytes). You can concatenate sequences of those pairs into a tar archive and call that a database. To access “the last object” you’d have to seek over the “first” objects. So you can build another set of (some name, blob of bytes) that serves as an index into the first set. You’ll first have to do at least one full pass over that first set, and you’ll need to make space on the books to account for twice as many sets, AND you’ll still have to do some seeking over the “first objects” in the indexing collection, but it all keeps recall times very short!

        • iarigby@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          What do you mean by “no structure”? Afaik mongodb does not enforce a schema in a collection by default

          • Victor@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Ah yes, mongo and document databases, forgot about those. Yeah those could be a pain to get data from if there’s no structure. 😅