Non-Relational Databases

22 June 2011

This meetup was sponsored by the Software Architecture and Platform (SAP) SIG of the Silicon Valley Forum. The speaker - Chris Westin - was from a company called MongoDB, an open source database management system that is not relational.

Chris Westin started out by saying that implementations of the relational data model have difficulty with schema changes and slow write rates. He then categorized the current commercial landscape of non-relational database management systems:

I. Data Models

1) key/value stores

2) document stores where the document has named fields,

eg. json, xml -no joins necessary because of nesting

3) column-oriented store

4) graph databases - good for finding shortest paths, etc.

II. Consistency Models

1) single master

2) multiple master (aka "dynamo")

Any non-relational database currently available fits into one of the data model categories and one of the consistency model categories. For example, Mongo DB is a document store with the single master consistency model.

Features of MongoDB:

Open source, stores Json objects as Bson, has interesting advanced queries possible, supports sharding, supports all the application programming languages, downloadable from github.

MongoDB's business model is to get paid for support, consulting and training.

Users of MongoDB: Craigslist, bit.ly, Shutterfly

I asked "Where does Google's BigTable fit into the commercial landscape?" Answer: Big Table is dynamo (multiple masters) and column oriented, I think. It isn't on the slide because we can't download it and use it.

Chris saw a recent twitter: "If a product is not downloadable from github, it is dead to me."