In terms of database usage, the last decade was the age of the ORM with hundreds competing to persist our object graphs in plain old-fashioned RMDBS. Now we seem to be witnessing the coming of age of document-oriented databases. These databases are highly optimized for schema-free documents but are also very attractive for their ability to scale out and query a cluster in parallel.

Document-oriented databases also hold a couple of advantages over RDBMS's for persisting data models in object-oriented designs. As the tables are schema-free, one can store objects belonging to different classes in an inheritance hierarchy side-by-side. Also, as the domain model changes, so long as the code can cope with getting back objects from an old version of the domain classes, one can avoid having to migrate the whole database at every change.

On the other hand, the performance benefits of document-oriented databases mainly appear to come about when storing deeper documents. In object-oriented terms, classes which are composed of other classes, for example, a blog post and its comments. In most of the examples of this I can come up with though, such as the blog one, the gain in read access would appear to be offset by the penalty in having to write the whole blog post "document" every time a new comment is added.

It looks to me as though document-oriented databases can bring significant benefits to object-oriented systems if one takes extreme care to organize the objects in deep graphs optimized for the way the data will be read and written but this means knowing the use cases up front. In the real world, we often don't know until we actually have a live implementation we can profile.

So is the case of relational vs. document-oriented databases one of swings and roundabouts? I'm interested in people's opinions and advice, in particular if anyone has built any significant applications on a document-oriented database.