by Angela Guess
A new article offers insight into NoSQL’s unique capabilities: “With the world becoming connected through social media platforms and the use of internet more extensive than ever, there has been a massive explosion of data and content. This has led to an unprecedented need for scaling solutions that store and process data… Even larger companies have dealt with the horror of this scalability as they resorted to using traditional relational databases, eventually hitting limits that were unviable both financially and operationally. Google once ran off of 40,000 MySQL installations and Facebook was at one point spending $1M per month for specialized database hardware to serve their pictures. These unviable solutions led to a re-evaluation of existing database technologies and led to the Not-Only-SQL (NoSQL) movement.”
The article continues, “The NoSQL movement is characterized by a move away from traditional SQL based solutions in certain storage and processing situations. The fundamental reasons behind this are simple: (1) Not all your applications need relationships between data to be explicitly stored along with the data. (2) Moving the responsibility of interpreting data relationships out of the store allows for storing the data anywhere. That means you can simply add boxes as your data grows. (3) Storing your data as a set of key-value pairs as opposed to hard wired tables allows for more flexibility in storage design. (4) Absence of a pre-defined schema/tables allows you to easily extend your data model. (5) Data operations, both read and write, tend to be simple and lightweight in the absence of SQL processing and explicit relationship constraints.”
For more on NoSQL, see the full article and consider attending NoSQL Now! this August.
