Introduction to nosql databases

What is Nosql

A NoSQL database provides a mechanism for storage and retrieval of data that uses looser consistency models than traditional relational databases. Motivations for this approach include simplicity of design, horizontal scaling and finer control over availability. NoSQL databases are often highly optimized key–value stores intended for simple retrieval and appending operations, with the goal being significant performance benefits in terms of latency and throughput. NoSQL databases are finding significant and growing industry use in big data and real-time web applications. NoSQL systems are also referred to as "Not only SQL" to emphasize that they do in fact allow SQL-like query languages to be used.

Why i need it?

- Caching

- Big data
- High performent
- Small resource usage (In some cases)
- Cloud computing

NoSQL Categories

Key-values Stores are based primarily on Amazon's Dynamo Paper which was written in 2007. The main idea is the existence of a hash table where there is a unique key and a pointer to a particular item of data. These mappings are usually accompanied by cache mechanisms to maximize performance.
Ex: Memcached, Redis, ...

Column Family Stores were created to store and process very large amounts of data distributed over many machines. There are still keys but they point to multiple columns. In the case of BigTable (Google's Column Family NoSQL model), rows are identified by a row key with the data sorted and stored by this key. The columns are arranged by column family.
Ex: Cassandra, Googgle Big Table, ...

Document Databases were inspired by Lotus Notes and are similar to key-value stores. The model is basically versioned documents that are collections of other key-value collections. The semi-structured documents are stored in formats like JSON.
Ex: Mongodb, Couchbase

Graph Databases are built with nodes, relationships between notes and the properties of nodes. Instead of tables of rows and columns and the rigid structure of SQL, a flexible graph model is used which can scale across many machines.
Ex: Neo4j, FlockDb, TitanDb, ...