MIS 2502 Write-up

NoSQL databases

NoSQL database is the joint name of databases that are other than database management system of relational databases. Mostly, NoSQL databases don’t use SQL as its query language or tabular relations to store the data, and also they are usually horizontally scalable. Although back in late 60s, there were already similar style of databases existing, the concept NoSQL first officially appeared in 1998 by Carlo Strozzi. His open-source database was still relational, but didn’t use the standard SQL interface. In 2009, Johan Oskarsson rediscribed the term with “open source distributed, non relational databases”. Nowadays, NoSQL databases are widely used by more and more companies and websites. It’s going to be a new popular way to manage the data in the near future.

Compared to what we have learned in MIS2502, the SQL databases, NoSQL databases have many advantages. NoSQL is more cloud-friendly. A lot of oridinary and cheap servers can be used to store the load. Also, NoSQL databases can handle a large amount of  unstructured  data and scale-out the architecture very efficiently. NoSQL databases are sometimes called “not only SQL” databases, which means some of those databases can even support SQL-like languages.

As an example, a document model used by MongoDB currently is a type of NoSQL database. A set of key-value pairs as documents are held as a collection by the database. The embedded documents and arrays are used so that there is no need to use the join function in SQL, making the whole progress fast and highly performed. NoSQL databases are also used in Hadoop, HBase, Cassandra, Cloudata and so on.

Work Cited:

Menegaz, Grey. “What is NoSQL, and why do you need it?”. October 1, 2012

http://www.zdnet.com/article/what-is-nosql-and-why-do-you-need-it/

Lith, Adam; Mattson, Jakob (2010). “Investigating storage solutions for large data: A comparison of well performing and scalable data storage solutions for real time extraction and batch insertion of data” .Göteborg: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology. p. 70. Retrieved 12 May 2011. 

“NoSQL 2009”. Blog.sym-link.com. 12 May 2009. Retrieved 29 March 2010.