Intro to NoSQL

What is NoSQL?

Relational databases were introduced into the 1970s to allow applications to store data through a standard data modeling and query language (Structured Query Language, or SQL). At the time, storage was expensive and data schemas were fairly simple and straightforward. Since the rise of the web, the volume of data stored about users, objects, products and events has exploded. Data is also accessed more frequently, and is processed more intensively – for example, social networks create hundreds of millions of customized, real-time activity feeds for users based on their connections' activities.

Even rendering a single web page or answering a single API request may take tens or hundreds of database requests as applications process increasingly complex information. Interactivity, large user networks, and more complex applications are all driving this trend.

In response to this demand, computing infrastructure and deployment strategies have also changed dramatically. Low-cost, commodity cloud hardware has emerged to replace vertical scaling on highly complex and expensive single-server deployments. And engineers now use agile development methods, which aim for continuous deployment and short development cycles, to allow for quick response to user demand for features.

The Need for NoSQL

Relational databases were never designed to cope with the scale and agility challenges that face modern applications – and aren't built to take advantage of cheap storage and processing power that's available today through the cloud. Relational database vendors have developed two main technical approaches to address these shortcomings:

MANUAL SHARDING

Tables are broken up into smaller physical tables and spread across multiple servers. Because the database does not provide this ability natively, development teams take on the work of deploying multiple relational databases across a number of machines. Data is stored in each database instance autonomously. Application code is developed to distribute the data, distribute queries, and aggregate the results of data across all of the database instances. Additional code must be developed to handle resource failures, to perform joins across the different databases, for data rebalancing, replication, and other requirements. Furthermore, many benefits of the relational database, such as transactional integrity, are compromised or eliminated when employing manual sharding.

DISTRIBUTED CACHE

A number of products provide a caching tier for database systems. These systems can improve read performance substantially, but they do not improve write performance, and they add complexity to system deployments. If your application is dominated by reads then a distributed cache should probably be considered, but if your application is dominated by writes or if you have a relatively even mix of reads and writes, then a distributed cache may not improve the overall experience of your end users.

NoSQL databases have emerged in response to these challenges and in response to the new opportunities provided by low-cost commodity hardware and cloud-based deployment environments - and natively support the modern application deployment environment, reducing the need for developers to maintain separate caching layers or write and maintain sharding code.

Features of NoSQL Databases

NoSQL encompasses a wide variety of different database technologies but generally all NoSQL databases have a few features in common.

DYNAMIC SCHEMAS

Relational databases require that schemas be defined before you can add data. For example, you might want to store data about your customers such as phone numbers, first and last name, address, city and state – a SQL database needs to know this in advance.

This fits poorly with agile development approaches, because each time you complete new features, the schema of your database often needs to change. So if you decide, a few iterations into development, that you'd like to store customers' favorite items in addition to their addresses and phone numbers, you'll need to add that column to the database, and then migrate the entire database to the new schema.

If the database is large, this is a very slow process that involves significant downtime. If you are frequently changing the data your application stores – because you are iterating rapidly – this downtime may also be frequent. There's also no way, using a relational database, to effectively address data that's completely unstructured or unknown in advance.

NoSQL databases are built to allow the insertion of data without a predefined schema. That makes it easy to make significant application changes in real-time, without worrying about service interruptions – which means development is faster, code integration is more reliable, and less database administrator time is needed.

AUTO-SHARDING, REPLICATION AND INTEGRATED CACHING

Because of the way they are structured, relational databases usually scale vertically – a single server has to host the entire database to ensure reliability and continuous availability of data. This gets expensive quickly, places limits on scale, and creates a relatively small number of failure points for database infrastructure.

The solution is to scale horizontally, by adding servers instead of concentrating more capacity in a single server. Cloud computing makes this significantly easier, with providers such as Amazon Web Services providing virtually unlimited capacity on demand, and taking care of all the necessary database administration tasks. Developers no longer need to construct complex, expensive platforms to support their applications, and can concentrate on writing application code. In addition, a group of commodity servers can provide the same processing and storage capabilities as a single high-end server for a fraction of the price.

"Sharding" a database across many server instances can be achieved with SQL databases, but usually is accomplished through SANs and other complex arrangements for making hardware act as a single server. NoSQL databases, on the other hand, usually support auto-sharding, meaning that they natively and automatically spread data across an arbitrary number of servers, without requiring the application to even be aware of the composition of the server pool. Data and query load are automatically balanced across servers, and when a server goes down, it can be quickly and transparently replaced with no application disruption.

Most NoSQL databases also support automatic replication, meaning that you get high availability and disaster recovery without involving separate applications to manage these tasks. The storage environment is essentially virtualized from the developer's perspective.

Lastly, many NoSQL database technologies have excellent integrated caching capabilities, keeping frequently-used data in system memory as much as possible. This removes the need for a separate caching layer that must be maintained.

NoSQL Database Types

Since "NoSQL" just means non-relational and not SQL, there are many different ways to implement NoSQL technology. Generally, NoSQL databases include the following designs:

• Document databases pair each key with a complex data structure known as a document. Documents can contain many different key-value pairs, or key-array pairs, or even nested documents.
• Graph stores are used to store information about networks, such as social connections. Graph stores include Neo4J and HyperGraphDB.
• Key-value stores are the simplest NoSQL databases. Every single item in the database is stored as an attribute name, or key, together with its value. Examples of key-value stores are Riak and Voldemort. Some key-value stores, such as Redis, allow each value to have a type, such as "integer", which adds functionality.
• Wide-column stores such as Cassandra and HBase are optimized for queries over large datasets, and store columns of data together, instead of rows.