I decided to give MongoDB a try on a brand new rails project. It was also a change to get a bit familiar with the upcoming Rails 3 (there’s a release candidate now \o/).

I found two MongoDB adapters for rails: MongoMapper and Mongoid. Here’s an article with a comparison (thanks Tomé Duarte). After trying out the two on a really simple use case, I preferred working with Mongoid for 3 reasons:

• More Rails 3 alike (in validations, queries…)
• Better documentation
• Awesome web page design

I also used MongoHQ to try out their free plan for cloud hosting service. It’s very easy to use, but I’m still waiting for a good MongoDB front-end for inspecting my databases.

After some research on NoSQL databases, for a future rails project, the projects that caught my attention were:

• Tokyo Cabinet
• CouchDB
• MongoDB

I’ve spent some more time MongoDB. Their list of prodution deployments is impressive. John Nunemaker developed an adapter for ruby, the MongoMapper, which already supports some neat features like validations and callbacks, much on the ActiveRecord style. See this article and the presentation below for more info:

Still have to spend some time experimenting with it, but it seems promising. 

Has anyone tried NoSQL with rails, on a recent project? Thoughts to share?