title: What is the best/most efficient DBMS for a social networking website?
body: <p>I want to build a social networking site and I was wondering what is the best DBMS to use for such a site.</p>
  
  <p>I know this question has been asked a million times and always with the same pretentious arrogance of a newbie: <em>I want the "BEST" for MY site!</em> :-)</p>
  
  <p>I also understand that there is no "BEST" in this scenario. Every developer imagines/likes their data to be structured/related/stored in a different way. But I don't know from where to begin being a newbie. I know mySQL is probably the most popular, I keep hearing about MongoDB, CouchDB, Cassandra..</p>
  
  <p>I like the idea of a relational database. It makes sense, it's natural, human. But being a programmer/web developer I work with classes, objects, keys and properties and I believe a database should reflect that object-oriented character. I think noSQL types of databases work like that although I'm not sure how. However, it makes more sense to me that if I'm building/using objects in my code, objects with nested objects and arrays and I want to store these in a database, I might as well store them in a similar/equivalent fashion.</p>
  
  <p>Anyway, could someone point me to the right direction because I need to start off somewhere and see where that takes me anyway! :-)</p>
  
  <p>By the way, stupid newbie question coming your way right now : If I build the database and the website, but decide that I should go with a different database after all, is such a thing as a "migration" (e.g. from mySQL to noSQL and vice versa) possible for a live website or a nightmare?</p>
  
  <p>Thank you in advance for your help!</p>