NOSQL

Classical Relational Database

• A database transaction, must be atomic, consistent,
isolated and durable. As Discussed Below

• Atomic : A transaction is a logical unit of work which

must be either completed with all of its data
modifications, or none of them is performed.

• Consistent : At the end of the transaction, all data

must be left in a consistent state.
 Cont…
• Isolated : Modifications of data performed by a
transaction must be independent of another
transaction. Unless this happens, the outcome of a
transaction may be erroneous.

• Durable : When the transaction is completed, effects of

the modifications performed by the transaction must
be permanent in the system.

• Often these four properties of a transaction are

acronymed as ACID.
 Distributed Systems
• A distributed system consists of multiple computers
and software components that communicate through a
computer network (a local network or by a wide area
network).

• A distributed system can consist of any number of

possible configurations, such as mainframes,
workstations, personal computers, and so on.

• The computers interact with each other and share the

resources of the system to achieve a common goal.
 Advantages of Distributed
Computing
• Reliability (fault tolerance) :
The important advantage of distributed computing system is
reliability. If some of the machines within the system crash, the
rest of the computers remain unaffected and work does not stop.

• Scalability :
In distributed computing the system can easily be expanded by
adding more machines as needed.

• Sharing of Resources :
Shared data is essential to many applications such as banking,
reservation system. As data or resources are shared in
distributed system, other resources can be also shared (e.g.
expensive printers).
 Cont…
• Speed :
A distributed computing system can have more
computing power and it's speed makes it different
than other systems.
• Open system :
As it is open system, every service is equally
accessible to every client i.e. local or remote.
• Performance :
The collection of processors in the system can provide
higher performance (and better price/performance
ratio) than a centralized computer.
 Disadvantages of Distributed
Computing
• Software :
Less software support is the main disadvantage of
distributed computing system.
• Networking :
The network infrastructure can create several
problems such as transmission problem, overloading,
loss of messages.
• Security :
Easy access in distributed computing system increases
the risk of security and sharing of data generates the
problem of data security
 NOSQL
• NoSQL is a non-relational database management
systems, different from traditional relational database
management systems in some significant ways.
• It is designed for distributed data stores where very
large scale of data storing needs (for example Google
or Facebook which collects terabits of data every day
for their users).
• These type of data storing may not require fixed
schema, avoid join operations and typically scale
horizontally.
 Why NoSQL?
• In today’s time data is becoming easier to access and
capture through third parties such as Facebook,
Google+ and others.
• Personal user information, social graphs, geo location
data, user-generated content and machine logging
data are just a few examples where the data has been
increasing exponentially.
• To avail the above service properly, it is required to
process huge amount of data.
• The evolution of NoSql databases is to handle these
huge data properly.
•
 Example 1
Social-network graph :
Each record: UserID1, UserID2

Separate records: UserID, first_name,

last_name, age, gender,...

Task: Find all friends of friends of friends of ...

friends of a given user.
 Example 2
Wikipedia pages
Large collection of documents

Combination of structured and unstructured

data

Task: Retrieve all pages regarding athletics of

Summer Olympic before 1950.
 RDBMS vs NoSQL
• RDBMS
- Structured and organized data
- Structured query language (SQL)
- Data and its relationships are stored in separate
tables.
- Data Manipulation Language, Data Definition
Language
- Tight Consistency
 RDBMS vs NOSQL
• NoSQL
- Stands for Not Only SQL
- No declarative query language
- No predefined schema
- Key-Value pair storage, Column Store, Document
Store, Graph databases
- Eventual consistency rather ACID property
- Unstructured and unpredictable data
- CAP Theorem
- Prioritizes high performance, high availability and
scalability
- BASE Transaction
 CAP Theorem (Brewer’s Theorem)

• CAP theorem states that there are three basic

requirements which exist in a special relation
when designing applications for a distributed
architecture.
CAP Stands for
 Consistency
 Availability
 Partition Tolerance
 CAP Theorem Cont…
• Consistency - This means that the data in the
database remains consistent after the execution of an
operation. For example after an update operation all
clients see the same data.
• Availability - This means that the system is always on
(service guarantee availability), no downtime.
• Partition Tolerance - This means that the system
continues to function even the communication among
the servers is unreliable, i.e. the servers may be
partitioned into multiple groups that cannot
communicate with one another.
 CAP Theorem Cont…
• CAP provides the basic requirements for a
distributed system to follow 2 of the 3
requirements.

• Therefore all the current NoSQL database

follow the different combinations of the C, A, P
from the CAP theorem.

• Here is the brief description of three

combinations CA, CP, AP :
 Cont…
CA - Single site cluster, therefore all nodes are always in
contact. When a partition occurs, the system blocks.

CP - Some data may not be accessible, but the rest is

still consistent/accurate.

AP - System is still available under partitioning, but

some of the data returned may be inaccurate.
Cont…
 NoSQL pros/cons
• Advantages :
– High scalability
– Distributed Computing
– Lower cost
– Schema flexibility, semi-structure data
– No complicated Relationships
 Cont…
• Disadvantages
– No standardization
– Limited query capabilities (so far)
– Eventual consistent is not intuitive to program for
 The BASE
• The BASE acronym was defined by Eric Brewer, who
is also known for formulating the CAP theorem.

• The CAP theorem states that a distributed computer

system cannot guarantee all of the following three
properties at the same time:
– Consistency
– Availability
– Partition tolerance
 Cont…
• Basic Availability:-
The database appears to work most of the time.
• Soft-state :-
Stores don’t have to be write-consistent, nor do
different replicas have to be mutually consistent all the
time.
• Eventual consistency
Stores exhibit consistency at some later point
 ACID vs BASE
ACID BASE

Atomic Basically Available

Consistency Soft state

Isolation Eventual consistency

Durable
 NoSQL Categories
• There are four general types (most common
categories) of NoSQL databases.

– Key-value stores
– Column-oriented
– Graph
– Document oriented
 Key-value stores
• Key-value stores are most basic types of NoSQL
databases.
• Designed to handle huge amounts of data.
• Based on Amazon’s Dynamo paper.
• Key value stores allow developer to store schema-less
data.
• In the key-value storage, database stores data as hash
table where each key is unique and the value can be
string, JSON, BLOB (Binary Large OBject) etc.
• A key may be strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets
and values are stored against these keys.
 Cont…
• For example a key-value pair might consist of
a key like "Name" that is associated with a
value like "Robin".
• Key-Value stores can be used as collections,
dictionaries, associative arrays etc.
• Key-Value stores follow the 'Availability' and
'Partition' aspects of CAP theorem.
• Key-Values stores would work well for
shopping cart contents, or individual values
like color schemes, a landing page URI, or a
default account number.
 Cont…
• Example of Key-value store Data Base
Redis, Dynamo, Riak. etc.
 Column-oriented databases
• Column-oriented databases primarily work on
columns and every column is treated individually.
• Values of a single column are stored contiguously.
• Column stores data in column specific files.
• In Column stores, query processors work on
columns too.
• All data within each column datafile have the
same type which makes it ideal for compression.
 Cont…
• Column stores can improve the performance of
queries as it can access specific column data.

• High performance on aggregation queries (e.g.

COUNT, SUM, AVG, MIN, MAX).

• Works on data warehouses and business

intelligence, customer relationship
management (CRM), Library card catalogs
etc.
 Cont…
• Example of Column-oriented databases
BigTable, Cassandra, SimpleDB etc.
 Graph databases
• A graph data structure consists of a finite (and
possibly mutable) set of ordered pairs, called
edges or arcs, of certain entities called nodes
or vertices.
• The following picture presents a labeled graph
of 6 vertices and 7 edges.
 What is a Graph Databases?
• A graph database stores data in a graph.
• A graph database is a collection of nodes and edges
• Each node represents an entity (such as a student or
business) and each edge represents a connection or
relationship between two nodes.
• Every node and edge are defined by a unique
identifier.
• Each node knows its adjacent nodes.
• As the number of nodes increases, the cost of a local
step (or hop) remains the same.
• Index for lookups.
 Comparison between the classic
relational model and the graph model

Relational model Graph model

Tables Vertices and Edges set

Rows Vertices

Columns Key/value pairs

Joins Edges

Example of Graph databases : OrientDB, Neo4J, Titan.etc.

 Document Oriented databases
• A collection of documents
• Data in this model is stored inside documents.
• A document is a key value collection where the key
allows access to its value.
• Documents are not typically forced to have a schema
and therefore are flexible and easy to change.
• Documents are stored into collections in order to
group different kinds of data.
• Documents can contain many different key-value
pairs, or key-array pairs, or even nested documents.
Comparison between the classic
relational model and the
document model :

Relational model Document model

Tables Collections

Rows Documents

Columns Key/value pairs

Joins not available

Example of Document Oriented databases : Mongo DB, Couch DB etc.