When should I use a NoSQL database instead of a relational database?

Technology CommunityCategory: NoSQLWhen should I use a NoSQL database instead of a relational database?
VietMX Staff asked 3 years ago

Relational databases enforces ACID. So, you will have schema based transaction oriented data stores. It’s proven and suitable for 99% of the real world applications. You can practically do anything with relational databases.

But, there are limitations on speed and scaling when it comes to massive high availability data stores. For example, Google and Amazon have terabytes of data stored in big data centers. Querying and inserting is not performant in these scenarios because of the blocking/schema/transaction nature of the RDBMs. That’s the reason they have implemented their own databases (actually, key-value stores) for massive performance gain and scalability.

If you need a NoSQL db you usually know about it, possible reasons are:

  • client wants 99.999% availability on a high traffic site.
  • your data makes no sense in SQL, you find yourself doing multiple JOIN queries for accessing some piece of information.
  • you are breaking the relational model, you have CLOBs that store denormalized data and you generate external indexes to search that data.