The world of data storage is up for a massive shift. A whole new breed of scalable data stores is gaining popularity & that too the pace is too fast for traditional databases to recoil & grapple with. I am afraid to say, but they are starting to look like a thing of past. The whole data tier is being shaken up as Memcached appears right next to MySQL. While some might see it as a move away from MySQL and PostgreSQL, the traditional open source relational data stores, it’s actually a higher-level change. Much of this change is the result of a few revelations.
A relational database isn’t always the model or system for every piece of data. They are tricky to scale (especially if you start with a single monolithic configuration–they aren’t distributed by design), when it comes to performance normalization hurts.
The new data stores vary quite a bit in their specific features, but in general they draw from a similar set of high-level characteristics. Not all of them meet all of these, of course, but just looking at the list gives you a sense of what they’re trying to accomplish.
- de-normalized, often schema-free, document storage
- key/value based, supporting lookups by key
- horizontal scaling
- built in replication
- HTTP/REST or easy to program APIs
- support for MapReduce style programming
- Eventually Consistent
And I could probably list another half a dozen qualities that many of them share too. But to me, the first two are the biggest departure form the traditional RDBMS. Of course, you can stick with MySQL and go non-relational.
The movement to these distributed schema-free data stores has begun to use the name NoSQL. You can find the overview of some of the implementations by GeekTantra here.
