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Working with NoSQL Databases
How to get started with NoSQL?
Since 2009, NoSQL databases becomes more and more popular. But why?
- No usage of SQL, that means
- Less complexity
- Better portability
- Boundlessness
- User-friendliness
- Most databases are Open-Source
- Performance
- Scalability
Famous companies like Twitter, Facebook and Amazon are using NoSQL databases.
What sorts of NoSQL databases are used today?
- Key-Value stores
- Easy to implement
- Only key-value-pairs can be stored
- Difficult to build complex data structures
- Column stores
- Columns don't have to be defined in advance.
- A row can have different numbers of cells
- Document stores
- Like key-value stores, but allows nested values
- Graph databases
- Objects and relationships are modelled and persisted as nodes and edges of a graph
What NoSQL databases are present today?
- Cassandra
- Data Model: Columnfamily
- Query API: Thrift
- CouchDB
- Data Model: Document
- Query API: map/reduce views
- HBase
- Data Model: Columnfamily
- Query API: Thrift, REST
- MongoDB
- Data Model: Document
- Query API: Cursor
- Neo4j
- Data Model: Graph
- Query API: Graph
- Redis
- Data Model: Collection
- Query API: Collection
- Riak
- Data Model: Document
- Query API: Nested hashes
- Scalaris
- Data Model: Key/value
- Query API: get/put
- Tokyo Cabinet
- Data Model: Key/value
- Query API: get/put
- Voldemort
- Data Model: Key/value
- Query API: get/put
.NET APIs
Cassandra
CouchDB
MongoDB
Tokyo Cabinet
Further Reading
A good introduction to the concepts of NoSQL is the paper "NoSQL Databases" from Christof Strauch.
Also read the "Scalable SQL and NoSQL Data Stores" from Rick Cattell.
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