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Kindle Notes & Highlights
If the data in your application has a document-like structure (i.e., a tree of one-to-many relationships, where typically the entire tree is loaded at once), then it’s probably a good idea to use a document model.
MySQL is a notable exception — it copies the entire table on ALTER TABLE, which can mean minutes or even hours of downtime when altering a large table — although various tools exist to work around this limitation
If your application has mostly one-to-many relationships (tree-structured data) or no relationships between records, the document model is appropriate.
there is a big difference between storage engines that are optimized for transactional workloads and those that are optimized for analytics.
Maintaining a sorted structure on disk is possible (see “B-Trees”), but maintaining it in memory is much easier. There are plenty of well-known tree data structures that you can use, such as red-black trees or AVL trees [2].
(A Bloom filter is a memory-efficient data structure for approximating the contents of a set. It can tell you if a key does not appear in the database, and thus saves many unnecessary disk reads for nonexistent keys.)
