RavenDB in practice, Part 1 - An Introduction To RavenDB
Recently I started to learn how to use RavenDB. I never used RavenDB or any other document database before, and when I was thinking on a database it was mainly on the relational form of it. What this means is that for me, a database must have tables, rows and columns in order to be considered as something that I want to use. Well, now that I see what RavenDB can give me, I think that this is all going to change.
As I’m currently learning how to use RavenDB, I’m going to write a series of blog posts that will demonstrate how to use RavenDB without any prior knowledge of it required. This will be an “in practice” demonstration, which means that I’m going to demonstrate how to use RavenDB in practice rather than talk on the ideas that behind it.
Why would I want to use a Document Database?
Using a document database like RavenDB will give you the following benefits:
- Better performance in your application
- Faster development time
- Better maintenance experience
If you want to see more information of those benefits, take a look in the RavenDB documentation.
What is a document database and what is RavenDB?
RavenDB is a document database, which stores each document in JSON format. In a document database any entity can be stored as a document. You don’t have to define in advance the schema of your data in order to store it, all you have to do is to give RavenDB an object and RavenDB will store it. Later in this post, I’ll show you what does a document looks like.
Start using RavenDB
Let’s start to see how to use RavenDB. Go to RavenDB website (http://ravendb.net/download) and download RavenDB. After extracting the .zip file to a folder, you’ll see the following folder structure:
