In this digital world, data is growing very fast and has become more complex in terms of volume, variety, and velocity in nature. Today, the world needs databases to be able to store and process big data effectively. There is a demand for high performance while reading and writing operations are executed. This affects large-scale and high-concurrency applications, such as search engines, Facebook, and Amazon hence the traditional database limits itself to such complex requirements, therefore various types of non-relational databases that are commonly referred to as NoSQL (Not only structured query language) databases. Their primary advantage is they handle unstructured data. ACID is not the major concern, NoSQL uses BASE instead which works on eventual consistency.

What is ACID and BASE in term of NoSQL?

The RDBMS strongly follows the ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability) properties; on the other hand, NoSQL databases follow BASE (Basically Available, Soft State, eventual consistency) principles.

Characteristics of NoSQL:

Elastic scaling: In NoSQL, new nodes can be added or removed from the data layer without application interruption.

Bigger Data Handling Capability: Because of its elastic nature of handling, Big Data becomes easier with better performance.

Lesser Server Cost: RDBMS relies on expensive proprietary servers and storage systems whereas NoSQL databases use clusters of cheap commodity servers which reduces the cost per gigabyte in NoSQL.

No Schema or Fixed Data model: NoSQL does not require a rigid database schema to be defined. Here, the data can be inserted into the database without first defining a database schema. It also allows a changed format or data model, without application disruption. This provides flexibility in NoSQL.

Integrated Caching Facility: to increase data output and performance, NoSQL stores cache data in system memory.

Handling relational data:

NoSQL databases cannot handle joins in queries. Hence, to handle relational data, the database schema needs to be designed differently. Three main techniques for handling relational data in a NoSQL database are as follows:- 

• Multiple queries: Instead of retrieving the data with one query, one can use several queries to get the desired data. NoSQL queries are comparatively faster than SQL queries.

• Caching/replication/non-normalized data: In this approach, it stores actual foreign values instead of storing foreign keys in the model’s data.

For example, Each blog comment includes the username instead of the user id, this provides easy access to the username without another lookup. Whenever you change a username, this will be updated in many places in the database itself. Hence, this approach works better when read operations are less than write operations.

• Nesting data: In MongoDB, it is possible to put more data in a smaller number of collections.
For example: In a blogging application, storing comments within the blog post is recommended so that with a single retrieval you get all the comments. Thus, this approach stores all the related data in a single document.

NoSQL over RDBMS in the below areas:

● It supports semi-structured data and volatile data.
● It supports flexibility in the schema.
● Read/Write operations have very high throughput.
● Horizontal scalability is achieved.
● It supports Big Data in Terabytes/Petabytes.
● It also supports Analytic tools on top of Big Data.
● No need for expensive hardware machines.
● Memory caching increases the performance of queries.

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