NoSQL, Drupal. Drupal major upgrade. Modules. Modules Modules.

In the last major chunk of work I did for Nokia, I was working with mongodb (one of the crop of NoSQL document stores popping up like mushrooms in the fall in New England) and, despite some serious warts, I was impressed with the value of an unstructured schemaless data store when working on a fluid prototype. I've been thinking ever since that drupal's data store would be a natural fit for something like mongodb. I wasn't alone.

Drupal 7.0 adds support for mongodb, sorta kinda, maybe, but there are a few problems with it, at least for this site. I'm nearly sure I could migrate the content of this blog, since there is so little of it, to a new drupal 7 install. What is apparent after poking it with a stick for a little while is

  • drush isn't going to work, or at least if it is going to work its not any faster for me to figure out how to make it do an upgrade of my drupal 6 to 7
  • even if it did work, most of the modules I use aren't supported. This is where I got to (I think… I may have blacked out for a bit) when I got drush to offer to do an upgrade. It helpfully let me know that nearly every module I use wasn't available, or (in the case of CCK? like I said I may have blacked out) would require some manual intervention

And after that, I'd still have to install the drupal mongo modules, and THEN I'd still have to have both mysql and mongo, since not all the backend is supported in mongo.

That's about the point where I decided that unless it was just "because it's there" there isn't much of a reason to make the upgrade.

Maybe next year.