Notes from NoSQL meetup in ATLSWC

Some notes from “Overview of NoSQL Database systems” hosted by Thoughtworks, Atlanta.

Presenter: Noah Kriegel

Starters: Awesome pizza and drinks.

Presentation Gist

Most of the content is inspired from NoSQL Distilled by Martin Fowler and Pramod Sadalage, but Noah did a good job in extracting the necessary stuff and supplementing it with his own experience.

Why We Love RDBMS

• ACID compliant
• Standard, expressive, and powerful SQL

Why the Hate?

• Challenges with data replication and multi-node setup resulting in expensive infrastructure
• Application object and DB data type mismatch. Tools like ActiveRecord and Hibernate help overcome this but have their own pitfalls

The NoSQL Movement

• Inspired by two landmark papers on Google BigTable and Amazon DynamoDB
• Gained traction with developers, unlike earlier failures like Object databases

Some Important Facts to Remember

• CAP theorem
• Quorum-based voting techniques

NoSQL Types

• Key Store
• Document-oriented database
• Column-oriented DBMS
• Graph databases

Each type was discussed in terms of:

• Introduction and key features
• When to use
• When not to use
• Sample code

Key TIL

• CQL closely mirrors SQL in its syntax
• Redis stands for REmote DIctionary Server
• Mongo is stripped from the word humongous