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Relational VS On the Fly Content Management

Tony Spiro's avatar

Tony Spiro

April 11, 2015

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Variety is the spice of life and it is essential to flexible content management.  Currently I'm seeing the trend of data storage move from relational to on-the-fly structures.  Relational databases like MSSQL and MySQL are being less favored and more developers are choosing to move to NoSQL databases like MongoDB.  By more developers I include myself because this is a very flexible and intuitive way to store data.  Key / Value, or as I like to call on-the-fly, content storage is the next stage of content management.  Relational structures bind where on-the-fly sets free.  This is the theory behind Cosmic metafields.

Content items are like people in that they come in all shapes, sizes and colors.  Cosmic objects allow you to create metafields which give you the power to add on-the-fly key / value pairs.  Create infinite metafields and drag and drop them into parent / child relationships. 

I find it so much easier to keep track of my key / value pairs per object rather than managing a relational schema.  I believe this is the new way of on-the-fly content management that will allow for flexibility and scalability of future content.