Which database type to use for an object-oriented content management system coded in PHP (5.3)?

Question

A friend of mine and I just started an own project to learn about the newest and most future relevant web techniques: we decided to build an own object-oriented content management system with enhanced functionality like the community-points function on this site.

Using PHP as developing language and MySQL as database – which seems to be the standard database solution for everything on the internet – we quickly got into trouble saving our objects into the database, especially the references between objects. As a first solution we worked with table that - as we know now - are called "joints".

But then I started a research on how to solve this problem. Here's what I found:

• there are object-oriented mapping solutions for relational databases, also for MySQL & PHP
• there is a special database model designed for solving this particular problem: the object-oriented database
• the object-relational database, a hybrid model that basically is a relational database with special handling for object savings

Since I don't want to start one more best-database-model-debate, here's my specific question:

Which of all solutions I have mentioned and you know from elsewhere is the one that's well supported from enough and not too expensive web-storage providers and is good enough for "basic" object-oriented functionality and thus be good choice implementing an object-oriented content managment system? (Again, the most painful thing we have crossed til now is the lack of referencing other objects in the database.)

Recommandations on particular database types are highly welcome!

Answer 1

You can try any "NoSQL" database, they are not relational. For example, MongoDB. Mongo stores data in BSON format which is like JSON and in PHP you can easily handle JSON data. You can find information about NoSQL databases at http://nosql-database.org/ and take a look about MongoDB as well http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MongoDB