What choices for a relational Document-store (NoSql?) database engine?

What choices are there for document-store databases that allow for relational data to be retrieved? To give a real example, say you have a database to store blog posts. I'd like to have the data look something like:

{id: 12345,

title: "My post",

body: "The body of my post",

author: {

id: 123,

name: "Joe Bloggs",

email: "joe.bloggs@example.com"

}

}

Now, you will likely have a number of these records that all share the author开发者_如何转开发 details. What I'd really like is to have the author itself stored as a different record in the database, so that if you update this one record every post record that links to it gets the updates as well. To date the only way I've seen mentioned to do this is to have the post record instead store an ID of the author record, so that the calling code will have to make two queries of the data store - one for the post and another for the author ID that is linked to the post.

Are there any document store databases that will allow me to make a single query and return a structured document containing the linked records? And preferably allow me to edit an internal part of the document, persist the document as a whole and have the correct thing happen [I.e. in the above, if I retrieved the entire document, changed the value of email and persisted the entire document then the email address of the author record is changed, and reflected in all posts that have that author...]

First, let me acknowledge: This particular type of data is somewhat relational by nature. It just depends on exactly how you want to structure this type of data, and what technologies that you have easy access to for this particular project. That said, how do you want your data structured?

If you can structure your data any way you want, you could go with something like this:

{
  name: 'Joe', 
  email: 'joe.bloggs@ex.com', 
  posts: [
    {
      id: 123, 
      title: "My post"
    },
    {..}
  ] 
} 

Where all the posts were contained in one particular key/value pair. This particular type of data I would say is uniquely suited for Riak (due to it being able to query internally against JSON using JavaScript natively). Though you could probably come at it from just about any of the NoSQL data store point of views (Cassandra, Couch, Mongo, et al..), as most of them can store straight up JSON. I just have a tendency towards Riak at this point, due to my personal experience with it.

The more interesting things that you'll probably run up against will relate to how you deal with the data store. For instance, I really like using Ripple for Ruby, which lets me deal with this kind of data in Riak real easy. But if you're in Java land, that might make adoption of this technique a bit more difficult (though I haven't spent a lot of time looking in to Java adoption of Riak), since it tends to lag on 'edge' style data storage techniques.

What is more than that, getting your brain to start thinking in NoSQL terms, or without using 'relations' is what usually takes the longest in structuring data. Because there isn't a schema, and there aren't any preconceptions that come with it, that means that you can do a lot of things that are thought of as simply wrong in the relational DB world. Like storing all of the blog posts for a single user in one document, which just wouldn't work in the standard schema-heavy strongly table based relational world.