In the past 30 years the world of IT has seen many changes in data, programming languages, architectures, platforms, and processes. In all this time one thing has stayed constant—relational databases (RDBMS).
The advent of Big Data with its 3V’s (Volume, Velocity and Variety) has dramatically changed the landscape. However even this will seem lame compared to what is yet to come through telemetry based Internet of Things. Apple has already foreshadowed this new immense data flood with the introduction of Home and Health aspects into its new iOS 8 system. This will introduce a whole new world of self-quantisation data flowing from our wearable monitors, clothing and smart home based devices.
We face volumes of data too large to work well or fit in traditional RDBMSs or DW systems. To deal with this deluge of largely unstructured data we have the emergence of new data management systems under the confrontational tag of NoSQL. The term “NoSQL” is generally applied to a number of recent non-relational databases such as Cassandra, MongoDB, Hive, Accumulo, MemCache, Neo4J, Riak and many others. When we design our traditional RDBMS systems we use known details about data and its access patterns to define the database, construct indexes or aggregations, deploy content across storage devices, and install the right tools to meet service-level obligations. The NoSQL systems accommodate schemaless data, run on clusters, and have the ability to trade off traditional consistency for other useful properties.
The new groupings that have emerged are Key:Value stores, Document oriented databases, Column Oriented databases and Graph databases. They are designed with the objective of managing unstructured data and facilitating advanced analytics. Relational databases are a powerful tool that we will continue to be used and will not be displaced by this new crop of NoSQL systems. The key change is that relational databases won’t be the only databases in use. We are entering a world where enterprises, and individual applications will use multiple technologies for data management.
envdata will help you determine if NoSQL databases offer a right solution for your future projects. We will also provide and install all systems and technologies required to successfully introduce the new Information Engineering requirements that will enable Advanced Analytics.