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NoSQL database systems: a survey and decision guidance

Computer Science - Research and Development

Abstract

Today, data is generated and consumed at unprecedented scale. This has lead to novel approaches for scalable data management subsumed under the term “NoSQL” database systems to handle the ever-increasing data volume and request loads. However, the heterogeneity and diversity of the numerous existing systems impede the well-informed selection of a data store appropriate for a given application context. Therefore, this article gives a top-down overview of the field: instead of contrasting the implementation specifics of individual representatives, we propose a comparative classification model that relates functional and non-functional requirements to techniques and algorithms employed in NoSQL databases. This NoSQL Toolbox allows us to derive a simple decision tree to help practitioners and researchers filter potential system candidates based on central application requirements.

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Notes

  1. The JavaScript Object Notation is a standard format consisting of nested attribute-value pairs and lists.

  2. In some systems (e.g. Bigtable and HBase), multi-versioning is implemented by adding a timestamp as third-level key.

  3. ACID [23]: Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Duration.

  4. BASE [42]: Basically Available, Soft-state, Eventually consistent.

  5. The FLP theorem states, that in a distributed system with asynchronous message delivery, no algorithm can guarantee to reach a consensus between participating nodes if one or more of them can fail by stopping.

  6. A read/write register is a data structure with only two operations: setting a specific value (set) and returning the latest value that was set (get).

  7. Therefore, consensus as used for coordination in many NoSQL systems either natively [4] or through coordination services like Chubby and Zookeeper [28] is even harder to achieve with high availability than strong consistency [19].

  8. Low-end hardware is used, because it is substantially more cost-efficient than high-end hardware [27, Sect. 3.1].

  9. Currently only RethinkDB can perform general \(\theta \)-joins. MongoDB’s aggregation framework has support for left-outer equi-joins in its aggregation framework and CouchDB allows joins for pre-declared map-reduce views.

  10. An alternative to MapReduce] are generalized data processing pipelines, where the database tries to optimize the flow of data and locality of computation based on a more declarative query language (e.g. MongoDB’s aggregation framework).

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Gessert, F., Wingerath, W., Friedrich, S. et al. NoSQL database systems: a survey and decision guidance. Comput Sci Res Dev 32, 353–365 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00450-016-0334-3

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