Cloud Computing: Heroku targets MongoDB with new Postgres V8 feature
June 5, 2013
Grazed from GigaOm. Author: Derrick Harris.
Heroku has rolled out a new feature in its Heroku Postgres service that lets the database act a lot more like NoSQL fave MongoDB. It’s probably good news for Heroku’s revenues and database customers, although possibly less so for the MongoDB-based services that the platform-as-a-service provider also supports.
In a nutshell, the new feature, called PL/V8 is Google’s V8 engine for running JavaScript, but turned into a procedural language within the Postgres database. V8 already runs within MongoDB and is part of what makes that database so adept at handling the JSON data type that is common among web applications. Because they are schemaless, JSON files let developers and applications work with different data types that might not fit within the rigid structure required by relational databases…
Now, Heroku’s Craig Kerstiens explained to me, Heroku Postgres users can use JavaScript to perform functions on those JSON files without ever having to touch the SQL engine inside Postgres. This type of functionality, he said, makes Heroku Postgres comparable to MongoDB, which many developers choose for its ability to handle flexible data types that traditional SQL databases don’t support…
Read more from the source @ http://gigaom.com/2013/06/05/heroku-takes-on-mongodb-with-new-postgres-v8-feature/