by Angela Guess
Barry Devlin of Smart Data Collective recently examined how well Business Intelligence and NoSQL databases can work together. He begins, “Business intelligence (BI) has long been associated with relational databases and the SQL language. From the earliest days of data warehousing, the qualities of the relational model have been highly valued in the quest for data consistency and quality. In addition, it was assumed that business users are comfortable with tables of information. This has been proven true, especially by spreadsheets, much to IT’s chagrin. Tables are also the lingua franca of BI tools and simple Select / Where queries are familiar to many users. But, whatever the rationale, the association of BI and SQL is deeply embedded in the minds of most practitioners. So, the question arises–what about NoSQL; how does this relate to BI? Can it be of use in data warehousing?”
Devlin goes on, “First, you need to know what flavor of NoSQL you’re speaking about. For brevity, I’ll focus only on one of the five or so varieties: document-oriented data stores… As I discovered about a year ago in a fascinating conversation with Max Schireson, president of 10gen /MongoDB, in this context a document is neither about e-mail contents nor Word documents; it refers to a particular data structure where records consist of an arbitrary set of fields, each identified by a name and value pair, structured in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) or similar language… So, let me release you from your suspense now. Can this be of use in BI? The short answer is yes. But to fully grasp the extent, I’d like to introduce you to two MongoDB customers and how they are easing into BI using NoSQL.”
