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INTRODUCTION TO
NOSQL DATABASES
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Outline
• Background
• What is NOSQL?
• Who is using it?
• 3 major papers for NOSQL
• CAP theorem
• NOSQL categories
• Conclusion
• References
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Background
• Relational databases ® mainstay of business
• Web-based applications caused spikes
• explosion of social media sites (Facebook, Twitter) with large data
needs
• rise of cloud-based solutions such as Amazon S3 (simple storage
solution)
• Hooking RDBMS to web-based application becomes
trouble
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What is NOSQL?
• The Name:
• Stands for Not Only SQL
• The term NOSQL was introduced by Carl Strozzi in 1998 to name
his file-based database
• It was again re-introduced by Eric Evans when an event was
organized to discuss open source distributed databases
• Eric states that “… but the whole point of seeking alternatives is
that you need to solve a problem that relational databases are a
bad fit for. …”
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What is NOSQL?
• Key features (advantages):
• non-relational
• don’t require schema
• data are replicated to multiple
nodes (so, identical & fault-tolerant)
and can be partitioned:
• down nodes easily replaced
• no single point of failure
• horizontal scalable
• cheap, easy to implement
(open-source)
• massive write performance
• fast key-value access
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What is NOSQL?
• Disadvantages:
• Don’t fully support relational features
• no join, group by, order by operations (except within partitions)
• no referential integrity constraints across partitions
• No declarative query language (e.g., SQL) ® more programming
• Relaxed ACID (see CAP theorem) ® fewer guarantees
• No easy integration with other applications that support SQL
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Who is using them?

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3 Major areas for NOSQL

• Three major papers were the “seeds” of the NOSQL
movement:
• BigTable (Google)
• DynamoDB (Amazon)
• Ring partition and replication
• Gossip protocol (discovery and error detection)
• Distributed key-value data stores
• Eventual consistency
• CAP Theorem
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The Perfect Storm

• Large datasets, acceptance of alternatives, and
dynamically-typed data has come together in a “perfect
storm”
• Not a backlash against RDBMS
• SQL is a rich query language that cannot be rivaled by the
current list of NOSQL offerings
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CAP Theorem
• Suppose three properties
of a distributed system (sharing data) A
• Consistency:
• all copies have same value
C
• Availability: P
• reads and writes always succeed
• Partition-tolerance:
• system properties (consistency and/or availability) hold even when
network failures prevent some machines from communicating with
others
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CAP Theorem
• Brewer’s CAP Theorem:
• For any system sharing data, it is “impossible” to guarantee
simultaneously all of these three properties
• You can have at most two of these three properties for any shared-
data system
• Very large systems will “partition” at some point:
• That leaves either C or A to choose from (traditional DBMS prefers
C over A and P )
• In almost all cases, you would choose A over C (except in specific
applications such as order processing)
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CAP Theorem
All client always have the
same view of the data
Availability

Consistency

Partition
tolerance
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CAP Theorem
• Consistency
• 2 types of consistency:
1. Strong consistency – ACID (Atomicity, Consistency,
Isolation, Durability)
2. Weak consistency – BASE (Basically Available
Soft-state Eventual consistency)
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CAP Theorem
• ACID
• A DBMS is expected to support “ACID transactions,” processes that
are:
• Atomicity: either the whole process is done or none is
• Consistency: only valid data are written
• Isolation: one operation at a time
• Durability: once committed, it stays that way

• CAP
• Consistency: all data on cluster has the same copies
• Availability: cluster always accepts reads and writes
• Partition tolerance: guaranteed properties are maintained even
when network failures prevent some machines from communicating
with others
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CAP Theorem
• A consistency model determines rules for visibility and
apparent order of updates
• Example:
• Row X is replicated on nodes M and N
• Client A writes row X to node N
• Some period of time t elapses
• Client B reads row X from node M
• Does client B see the write from client A?
• Consistency is a continuum with tradeoffs
• For NOSQL, the answer would be: “maybe”
• CAP theorem states: “strong consistency can't be achieved at the
same time as availability and partition-tolerance”
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CAP Theorem
• Eventual consistency
• When no updates occur for a long period of time, eventually all
updates will propagate through the system and all the nodes will
be consistent
• Cloud computing
• ACID is hard to achieve, moreover, it is not always required, e.g. for
blogs, status updates, product listings, etc.
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CAP Theorem
Each client always can
read and write.
Availability

Consistency

Partition
tolerance
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CAP Theorem
A system can continue to
operate in the presence of
a network partitions
Availability

Consistency

Partition
tolerance
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NOSQL categories
1. Key-value
• Example: DynamoDB, Voldermort, Scalaris
2. Document-based
• Example: MongoDB, CouchDB
3. Column-based
• Example: BigTable, Cassandra, Hbased
4. Graph-based
• Example: Neo4J, InfoGrid
• “No-schema” is a common characteristics of most NOSQL
storage systems
• Provide “flexible” data types
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Key-value
• Focus on scaling to huge amounts of data
• Designed to handle massive load
• Based on Amazon’s dynamo paper
• Data model: (global) collection of Key-value pairs
• Dynamo ring partitioning and replication
• Example: (DynamoDB)
• items having one or more attributes (name, value)
• An attribute can be single-valued or multi-valued like set.
• items are combined into a table
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Key-value
• Basic API access:
• get(key): extract the value given a key
• put(key, value): create or update the value given its key
• delete(key): remove the key and its associated value
• execute(key, operation, parameters): invoke an operation to the
value (given its key) which is a special data structure (e.g. List, Set,
Map .... etc)
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Key-value
Pros:
• very fast
• very scalable (horizontally distributed to nodes based on key)
• simple data model
• eventual consistency
• fault-tolerance

Cons:
- Can’t model more complex data structure such as objects
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Document-based
• Can model more complex objects
• Inspired by Lotus Notes
• Data model: collection of documents
• Document: JSON (JavaScript Object Notation is a
data model, key-value pairs, which supports objects,
records, structs, lists, array, maps, dates, Boolean
with nesting), XML, other semi-structured formats.
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Document-based
• Example: (MongoDB) document
• {Name:"Jaroslav",
Address:"Malostranske nám. 25, 118 00 Praha 1”,
Grandchildren: {Claire: "7", Barbara: "6", "Magda: "3", "Kirsten: "1",
"Otis: "3", Richard: "1“}
Phones: [ “123-456-7890”, “234-567-8963” ]
}
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Column-based
• Based on Google’s BigTable paper
• Like column oriented relational databases (store data in column order) but
with a twist
• Tables similarly to RDBMS, but handle semi-structured
• Data model:
• Collection of Column Families
• Column family = (key, value) where value = set of related columns (standard, super)
• indexed by row key, column key and timestamp

allow key-value pairs to be stored (and retrieved on key) in a massively parallel

system
storing principle: big hashed distributed tables
properties: partitioning (horizontally and/or vertically), high availability etc.
completely transparent to application

* Better: extendible records

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Column-based
• One column family can have variable
numbers of columns
• Cells within a column family are sorted “physically”
• Very sparse, most cells have null values
• Comparison: RDBMS vs column-based NOSQL
• Query on multiple tables
• RDBMS: must fetch data from several places on disk and glue together
• Column-based NOSQL: only fetch column families of those columns
that are required by a query (all columns in a column family are stored
together on the disk, so multiple rows can be retrieved in one read
operation à data locality)
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Column-based
• Example: (Cassandra column family--timestamps
removed for simplicity)
UserProfile = {
Cassandra = { emailAddress:”[email protected]” , age:”20”}
TerryCho = { emailAddress:”[email protected]” , gender:”male”}
Cath = { emailAddress:”[email protected]” ,
age:”20”,gender:”female”,address:”Seoul”}
}
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Graph-based
• Focus on modeling the structure of data (interconnectivity)
• Scales to the complexity of data
• Inspired by mathematical Graph Theory (G=(E,V))
• Data model:
• (Property Graph) nodes and edges
• Nodes may have properties (including ID)
• Edges may have labels or roles
• Key-value pairs on both

• Interfaces and query languages vary

• Single-step vs path expressions vs full recursion
• Example:
• Neo4j, FlockDB, Pregel, InfoGrid …