As presented at SXSW 2012. http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/12722

1. http://www.flickr.com/photos/fpat/3328595063/
Gary Dusbabek

2. Full Disclosure:
I work on Apache
Cassandra.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vmanso/4040094281/

3. My Goals For You
Should I?
How Then?
Achtung!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/29707865@N05/2780508266/

4. http://www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/6246957472/
A Brief History of
Databases

5. http://www.flickr.com/photos/watchsmart/1422274819/

6. 1960s

7. New
Stuff
Direct access
storage
Replaced Tape
New Possibilities
http://www.flickr.com/photos/byrion/5264950510/

8. Navigational
Databases
(two kinds)

9. Hierarchical
Parent-child

10. Network
Relationships
Graph

11. 1970s

12. Codd

13. Relational Model
Search by content
Good for query
Demands on processor
Rigid, fixed structures
Bad for modeling
http://www.flickr.com/photos/35536700@N07/3292544674

14. Today

15. Data needs
have
changed
http://www.flickr.com/photos/franzhaas/6761917637/

16. Data needs
have
changed
http://www.flickr.com/photos/franzhaas/6761917637/

17. Technology
has
changed
http://www.flickr.com/photos/neosnaps/2574417351/

18. http://www.flickr.com/photos/katclay/3935629242/
Choosing

19. Choosing
Technology
is Hard
™
Work .

20. Can you do it with a
relational database?
Is your DB falling apart?
What do you need?

21. Where RDBMS Fall Apart
Scaling
SPoF
Sharding
Denormalizing
Availability
Slave Systems http://www.flickr.com/photos/horiavarlan/4681206711/

22. What do you need?
Reduced cost
Throughput
Availability
Recoverability
Correctness
Transactions
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ell-r-brown/5866777592/
Flexible Schema

23. What is NoSQL?
Flight
http://www.flickr.com/photos/24277960@N08/2609390563/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/taylar/4996955547/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gromgull/611019520/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/igboo/2583174998/

24. What isn’t NoSQL?
NoFlight
http://www.flickr.com/photos/alanvernon/3121751152/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomsaint/3209482579/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pointnshoot/408384715/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zigazou76/5846255426/

25. Considerations
Fault Tolerance
Recovery
Replication
Access
Hooks
Distributed

26. Considerations
Data Model
Query/Search model
Transactional Semantics
Read vs Write Throughput
Deployment/Management

27. Focus on a few
systems
MongoDB
Master-Slave
Redis
FullyDistributed
Riak
HBase
Cassandra http://www.flickr.com/photos/seier/2455551478/sizes/l/in/photostream/

28. MongoDB
Document Oriented
Naturally denormalized
Flexible schema

29. MongoDB
Programmer friendly
Many language drivers
Atomic on a single document

30. MongoDB
Real-time data
warehousing/analytics
Blocking/offline compaction
Complicated queries

31. MongoDB
db.foo.find({j: {$ne: 3}, k: {$gt: 10} });
db.foo.find( { name : "bob" , $or : [ { a : 1 } , { b : 2 } ] } )

32. MongoDB
Master-slave replication
Asynchronous
Gives failover & data redundancy
But not consistency
Only master can receive writes
Makes atomic writes easy

33. Redis
Real-time stats
tracking
Wicked fast
Collections built in

34. Redis
In-memory
Snapshots
Master-slave
RAM limited

35. Riak
Relationships, aka “Links”
Built-in MapReduce
Completely schemaless
No SPoF
Scales linearly
Tunable consistency

36. Riak
Pre- Post-Hooks
Configurable storage engines
REST access
Easy cluster balancing

37. Riak
Doesn’t keep data sorted
Erlang

38. Cassandra
Query language
Range queries
Datacenter/Rack aware
Hadoop integration
Configurable cacheing
Live schema changes

39. Cassandra
Some schema
Growing cluster isn’t fair

40. HBase
Coprocessors
Versioned cells (BigTable)
Hadoop integration

41. HBase
HadoopNameNode is SPoF
Schema maintenance downtime
Schema required up front
Complicated balancing

42. http://www.flickr.com/photos/annguyenphotography/3267723713/
No Silver Bullet

43. http://www.flickr.com/photos/nateone/3768979925
/
HBase
@gdusbabek