During the last year I’ve been looking at various NoSQL databases. I’m particularly interested in the flexibility (no fixed schema) and I don’t care that much for scalability that some of these databases provide, therefore I focused on document databases like CouchDB, MongoDB and Raven DB.
After some reading, I decided it was time for an experiment and took Raven DB to create an ASP.NET membership provider. The main reason I chose Raven DB is that you can run it embedded in your .NET application (for example in ~/App_Data) without a separate server and it’s even possible to run the entire database in-memory, which is ideal for tests.
The result of the experiment can be found at https://github.com/martijnboland/RavenDBMembership. It’s a VS 2010 solution with the membership provider, some integration tests and an ASP.NET MVC 3 sample app. You can also directly download it from here.
Disclaimer:
I’m not sure that creating a Membership provider was the right thing to do to experience NoSQL. Sure, the provider works, but the Membership API forces you into a direction that isn’t necessarily suitable for document databases and there might be some NoSQL anti-patterns here and there in the code
Oh, and the ASP.NET MVC sample app extends the Membership mess that comes with the default MVC project template. Don’t take this as some best practices example.