Animesh Kumar {itsAnimesh}
I'm an IT professional/FOSS Geek living and working in New Delhi, India. Currently for the most part I work as a Technical Consultant developing Open Source ICT solutions for social and societal inclusion. I am a a FOSS enthusiast, I want to create an awareness about FOSS through the work I do. Below are the latest updates from a some social networks I subscribe to.
NoSQL Movement!!!
There is a community thats been buzzing for quite a while now… Its called NoSQL…
As well all know Relational databases are a pain (you know where)… They force us to twist are object data to fit a particular RDMS (Relational Database Management System)…
Well then why use it??? Why not shift over to a loosely defined class of non-relational data stores that break with a long history of relational databases… These data stores may not require fixed table schemas, usually avoid join operations and typically scale horizontally… Academics and papers typically refer to these databases as structured storage…
Get used to names like Dynomite, CassandraDB, CouchDB, BigTable, MongoDB, Hypertable, SimpleDB, etc… These are all members of NoSQL movement… The movement was started by Google’s BigTable and its clones such as Hypertable (ZVent)… Amazon is doing SimpleDB on Dynamo (not called a database, but a highly available key-value data store)… Facebook is doing CassandraDB… Apache CouchDB is a free, open source, document-oriented database written in Erlang programming language… MongoDB is a collection of JSON documents ( no rows or columns), an open source document-oriented DB written in C++ programming language…
So what is common between all these Databases :
- They can blow through enormous volumes of data. For example, Google’s BigTable with its sister technology MapReduce processes as much as 20 petabytes of data per day… We have not seen this volume in RDBMSs…
- They run on clusters of cheap PC Servers… Google has said that one of BigTable’s bigger clusters manages as much as 6 petabytes of data across thousands of servers… Oracle’s RAC (Rapid Application Cluster) can get there but at a much higher cost.
- They beat performance bottlenecks… The phrase used here is “eventually consistent”, trading off consistency to maximize availability and scalability…
- While conceding that relational databases offer an unparalleled feature set and a rock-solid reputation for data integrity, NoSQL proponents say this can be too much for their needs… Hence the mantra is “no overkill”…
I think this is exciting development… When people started working on RDBMS, they could not imagine the kind of scalability and data volumes being talked about now… It’s only natural that new approaches must be innovated to handle the demands of the Internet era… Eric Brewer of UC Berkeley floated the idea of this in his research work at least 6-7 years ago…
Although NoSQL movement is not a threat to mainstream database community yet, this may change in next 3-4 years time…
Cheers… 