aloneinkyoto

Ease of use is subjective. I dont think writing a mapreduce job needs to be more complex than writing an equivalent SQL query. What really matters is elegance, flexibility and power.

My personal experince is that the MongoDB model seems to win in most cases. Especially when it comes to flexibility and ad-hoc querying. Having a real language (javascript) and a flexible schema tend to make most business problems easier to express.

Both of those queries are very easy to perform in MongoDB.

For examples of how to easily model and query trees (CONNECT BY PRIOR in SQL) see: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Trees+in+MongoDB

SUM(CASE IF col IN ('a','b','c') THEN 1 ELSE 0) can be implemented as a group or mapreduce query.

I would say that you have a lot more power and flexibility in MongoDB compared to an average SQL database when it comes to ad-hoc querying.

Great observations and advice! I guess as you say, one of the conclusions we have drawn so far is that the music industry is hard. There is simply not a lot of money there, and most of it is focused on a few big players like iTunes.

Nonetheless we have some fairly good ideas for how to grow the business and how to broaden it. So I guess you persuaded me to at least give it a fair chance.

Disregarding the meager financial returns so far one of the biggest highlights have been all the interesting opportunities that the project has created. It has resulted in a few collaborations and potential projects/consulting jobs already. So I guess that's one aspect of why it can be rewarding to not give up on a good idea/project too easily.

The whole codec discussion instigated by the Mozilla Foundation is so mind-numbingly odd that it makes me cringe. I fully understand the arguments that creating a completely free and open source web browser is an important and non-negotiable goal. Nevertheless the (non-existent) dilemma relies on the false assumptions that:

1. Deciding on a single codec that everyone should use for everything, forever (or until we get to have the same discussion again with HTML6) is the only way forward. Which is just stupid and ignorant. Different codecs are good for different use cases. There is no "one true codec"and there never will be. H.264 is a good all-around video codec for hi-def internet video, which is why it is popular on sites like YouTube, etc.

2. "Support" does not have to mean including code in the Firefox browser for decoding H.264 video. It simply means that the browser makes a best effort try to play the video. That's all that the end user really cares about, and that is easily accomplished by using the codec frameworks already present in most modern operating systems. Webkit uses Quicktime to play media on OS X and thus supports all formats that Quicktime supports, for example.