SDTimes looks at the new crop of NoSQL databases – No SQL and the Not Only SQL data stores.
There are new graph databases, new time-series databases, highly expandable key-value stores, and even new takes on the relational model.
On Graphs
Another type of database that’s riding the NoSQL wave to success is the graph database. While graph databases have found an immediate niche inside social networking-related applications, Emil Eifrem, CEO of Neo Technology, said that their usefulness will be seen far beyond Facebook. He takes a different view of how databases are differentiated. “I always tend to take the data-model view to this explosion of databases,” he said. “What are the abstractions, the building blocks exposed to programmers? Graph has three core abstractions: nodes, typed relations between nodes, and key-value pairs attached to both nodes and attachments. That final point is incredibly important and very powerful. Graph is the first model that fundamentally embraces how relations are modeled as a first-class citizen.” That means that not only can individual objects or data items be referenced by a key-value pair, but all of that item’s connections to other items and objects can be called out by a key value as well. That means the relationships between data are modeled in a quickly accessible storage model. Eifrem is also bullish on graph database performance due to this first-class citizenship of relations. Rather than performing multiple sub-queries into the data and waiting for relations to pan out in the query, graph databases allow developers to quickly sort data on the fly without being forced to lay out the database schema according to unknown future data-organization requirements. That means info stored in a graph database can quickly be laid out by date, size, type, owner and any other sub-category, without those individual items being called out into their own tables or indexed in their own schema. “We talk about light-board friendliness. If you are able to sketch out your domain on a whiteboard, translating that into a data model in the database is typically taking that whiteboard and everything you’ve drawn as hub is a node, and every arrow is a relationship,” said Eifrem. Read the full article.
Keywords: nosql