I have been sort of avoiding the NoSQL document databases for a while. I tend to be need driven, and I just ran into a big speed bump with EAV (Entity-Attribute-Value) data for WheelMUD, my big open source project.

I did some research and found that RavenDB is a native .NET NoSQL engine. I downloaded it and had it going in a few minutes. The first thing that struck me was that there was no desktop UI to manage the documents. I didn't that deter me, so I used the web UI instead. Luckily, RavenDB comes with a built-in web server.

I was interested in the embbeded mode, so I tackled that first. I resorted to moving the database to where the server was, so that I could browse the document store. I had to do this every time I made a change, as I didn't want to bother to code the document database to the server directory. This was a throw-away app in any case.

I got as far as storing documents, and got stuck on creating indices for queriying the stored documents. The indices are just LINQ queries. I'm not sure about the other NoSQL implementations, but RavenDB stores the documents as JSON files.

I created a blog post on WheelMUD's site, with code and technical details.

The biggest tip that I can give people is to leave any relational database experience at the door. It will hinder you when dealing with NoSQL databases/document stores.