Schemaless Databases

Old data, new application

If we’re using something other than a relational database, then we’re done. A schemaless database is only schemaless as far as the database engine cares. Our application is another story entirely. It expects certain structure in the documents, values, or graph nodes returned by our database. Will all the old documents work on the new version of our application? We mean all the old documents, way back to the very first customer record we ever created. Chances are your application has evolved over time, and old versions of those documents might not even be readable now. Harder still, our database may have a patchwork of documents, all created using different application versions, with some that have been loaded, updated, and stored at different points in time. Some of those documents will have turned into ...