The rise of NoSQL is characterized with confusion and ambiguity; very much like any fast-emerging organic movement in the absence of well-defined standards and adequate software solutions. Whether you are a developer or an architect, many questions come to mind when faced with the decision of where your data should be stored and how it should be managed. The following are some of these questions: What does the rise of all these NoSQL technologies mean to my enterprise? What is NoSQL to begin with? Does it mean "No SQL"? Could this be just another fad? Is it a good idea to bet the future of my enterprise on these new exotic technologies and simply abandon proven mature Relational DataBase Management Systems (RDBMS)? How scalable is scalable? Assuming that I am sold, how do I choose the one that fit my needs best? Is there a middle ground somewhere? What is this Polyglot Persistence I hear about? The answers to these questions and many more is the subject of this talk along with a survey of the most popular of NoSQL technologies. Be there or be square.

1. Abdelmonaim Remani | Just.me Inc.
The Rise of NoSQL and
Polyglot Persistence

2. About Me
• Software Architect at Just.me Inc.
• Interested in technology evangelism and enterprise software
development and architecture
• Frequent speaker (JavaOne, JAX, OSCON, ORDEV, etc…)
• Open-source advocate
• President and founder of a number of user group
– NorCal Java User Group
– The Silicon Valley Spring User Group
– The Silicon Valley Dart Meetup
• Bio: http://about.me/PolymathicCoder
• Twitter: @PolymathicCoder
• Email: abdelmonaim.remani@gmail.com

3. License
• Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 Unported
– http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0
• Disclaimer: The graphics and the logo in the presentation
belong to their rightful owners

4. The Golden Age of Relational
Databases

5. Relational Data Stores
• Relational Data Stores have been the
predominant choice in storing data
– The existence mature solutions
• Oracle, MySQL, Ms SQL Server, etc…
– Wide adoption and familiarity
• Developers and even advanced business users
– An abundance of tools
– Etc…
• It became the De-Facto standard

6. The Relational Model
• Data
– Stored in
• 2 dimensional tables (Relations)
• Rows (tuples) and columns (attributes)
• Has well-define enforced schema
– Relations themselves
– Integrity constrains
• Normalization
– Smaller tables with well-defined relationship
between them
– Why?
• Minimized redundancy
• No modification anomalies
– Modification Propagation or cascading

7. The Relational Model
• Supported by SQL (Structured Query
Language)
– A somewhat standardized query language
– Very flexible
– Many Operations
• Across multiple relations such as JOIN
• Aggregations such as GROUP BY
• Etc…

8. The Relational Model
• Transactional
• ACID
– Atomicity
» All or nothing
– Consistency
» From one valid state to another
– Isolation
» Concurrency result in a valid state
– Durability
» Once committed, it’s forever

9. The Relational Model
• Designed with the assumptions that
– The end-user will directly interact with database
» It makes sense that the RDBMS should manage concurrency
and integrity
» Access Patterns are unknown
» A flexible query language that is close to English
» Data structure with no bias towards a particular pattern of
querying
– The database runs on a single machine
» The only way to promise true ACID

10. Road Bumps
• We started building more complex applications on top
of relational databases
– Business logic moved out of the RDBMS
» Fewer triggers and stored procedures and replaced by
equivalent application layer code
– The applications themselves evolved beyond the procedural
paradigm to a more OOP approach
» The Object-Relational impedance mismatch
» ORM framework to the rescue

11. Scalability

12. We became data hoarders!
• As our datasets grew out of control
• Performance decreases exponentially
– We buy a beefier machines
• Larry Ellison’s most expensive RAC and make
him even richer
• This put off the problem for a little while

13. Optimization
• We hire a guy
– Indexes half of the databases
• Made those queries a little faster
– Creates materialized views for complex joins
• Nightmare to maintain, get stale, etc…
– He de-normalizes
• Any thing but a smooth transition!
• Redundancy
– He introduces Caching
• Data too stale
• More redundancy

14. Clustering
• We hire another guy
– Tells us that we hit the limit of the one machine
– You need to scale out (Horizontally)
• Master/Slave
– Assuming you read more than you write
– Write to the Master and Read from the Slaves
– Master needs to replicate data across the slaves
» Risk incorrect reads
– How’s that consistent?!!
• Sharding
– Improves reads as much as writes
– Can’t join across partitions
– No referential integrity
– Requires modification of client applications
– Introduces a single-point of failure
– How’s that consistent?!!

15. What’s the Point?
• We vertically scale our relational
database
– We’re no longer consistent
– No ACIDity?
– We loose query flexibility
• Are we doing something wrong?

16. The CAP Theorem

17. The CAP Theorem
• Eric Brewer on distributed systems
– Pick tow out of
• Consistency
• Availability
• Partition Tolerance
• There is Fast Cheap Good service
– Cheap Good service won’t be Fast
– Fast Good service won’t be Cheap
– Fast Cheap service won’t be Good

18. Relational Model & CAP
• Relational Data Stores happen to favor
– Consistency and Availability
– For historical reasons
• They are key to certain type of applications
• The bank example
– I deposit $100 in my friend’s bank account
– Blah blah blah…
• According to CAP, Partition Tolerance is
impossible meaning that horizontal
scaling is impossible

19. Scheiße!
• We’re in a pickle
– Too much data in CA model
– Vertical Scaling
• Too expensive
• Not sustainable
• Forced to explore other alternatives in
light of CAP

20. What AP Looks Like
• Partition Tolerance
– Since we reached the limit of the one machine
we have no choice but to scale horizontally
– Which means to be partition tolerant
• Availability
– Nobody is willing to give up most of the time
– This becomes even better with distribution
– In a cluster of servers
• The individual node might be unreliable by itself
• But a whole inherently reliable

21. What AP Looks Like
• According the CAP we simply cannot have C
• Consistency
– I make a update and all subsequent read the most
updated value
– Unfortunately this is impossible as it takes time for
the change to be replicated across each node of
the cluster
• What a bummer?!
• Let’s look and AP system
– DNS (Domain Naming Service)
• Not all the nodes have the most updated records (You
register that domain name and wait for a few days to
guarantee that every DNS knows about it)

22. Eventual Consistency
• This is no so bad
– It means that we just settled for a lesser degree
Consistency
• So what if
– Mohammad in Morocco updated his relationship status
to single on an some edge node
– His cousin who lives Spain saw it immediately because
they happen to be on the same edge node
– His secret admirer Sara who lives in the United States
could not see it until an hour later
– His bother in Japan got the update the next day
– They all got it eventually!
• Eventual Consistency as Opposed to Immediate
Consistency

23. The Compromise
• We settle for weaker consistency model
– BASE
• Basically Available
• Soft state
• Eventual Consistency
• ACID on the individual node BASE on
the cluster

24. The Slippery Slope of the
Faithless

25. You might as well Question…
• Schema
– Logical
• Well-defined and rigid in relational databases
• Why not a flexible one or even no schema
– Physical
• B Trees in most relational databases
• Why not use some other underlying data
structure

26. You might as well Question…
• Integrity Constraints
– Who cares?
• A Query Language
– Anything would do…
• Security
– None
• Name it…

27. NoSQL: Going Rogue…

28. NoSQL
• A wide range of specialized data stores
with the goal of addressing the challenges
of the relational model
• Eric Evans
– The whole point of seeking alternatives is that
you need to solve a problem that relational
databases are a bad fit for
• Let me make it easier
– It is does not anti-SQL or anti-Relational
– Any data store that is non-relational
• “Not Only SQL” instead of “NO SQL”

29. SQL vs. NoSQL
A single machine A cluster
CA AP/CA/CP
Scale Vertically Scale Horizontally
SQL Custom APIs
ACID BASE
Full Indexes Mostly on Keys
There are outliers of course

30. SQL vs. NoSQL
Rigid Schema Schema-less
Flexible Queries Pre-defined Queries
• SQL (Relational)
– Concerned about what the data consists of
• NoSQL (Non-Relational)
– Concerned with how the data is queried
There are outliers of course

32. The Zoo

33. Key-Value Data Stores
• Basically a big hash map associative array
– Very Simple
– Very fast read and write
– No secondary indexes
• Use When
– Your data is not highly related
– All you need is basic CRUD
• Challenges
– Complex queries
• Check out the Amazon Dynamo Paper
• http://s3.amazonaws.com/AllThingsDistributed/sosp/amazon-dynamo-
sosp2007.pdf
• Featured Projects
– DynamoDB http://hbase.apache.org/
– Riak http://wiki.basho.com/
– Redis http://redis.io/

34. Columnar Stores
• In a table, data of the same column is stored together
– Storage is not wasted on null value as in row-based stores (RDBMS)
– Great for sparse tables
– Very fast column operation including aggregation
• Use When
– Big Data (Excellent leverage of Map Reduce)
– Need compression or versioning
• Challenges
– You better know your access patterns before hand
– Keys design is not trivial
• Check out Google’s BigTable Paper
– http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.go
ogle.com/en/us/archive/bigtable-osdi06.pdf
• Featured Projects
– Hbase http://hbase.apache.org/
– Cassanda http://cassandra.apache.org/

35. Document Data Stores
• Nested structures of hashes and their values
– A document can be
• Simply a hash and its value
• Hash and another document as its value
• No limit in depth
– Very Flexible schema
– Well-Indexed data
– Works well with OOP (No impedance mismatch)
– De-normalize as a best practice
• Use when
– You don’t know much about the schema
– The schema very likely to change
• Challenges
– Complex Join-like queries
– Self-referencing documents and circular dependencies
• Projects
– MongoDB http://www.mongodb.org/
– CouchDB http://couchdb.apache.org/

36. Graph Data Stores
• A graph
– Perfect for highly interconnected data
– Allows for explicit relationships
– Fined graph grained-traversal
– Very Flexible
– Works well with OOP (No impedance mismatch)
• Use when
– Your data looks like a graph and requires graph question
– You are smart enough not to try this on another data store
• Challenges
– Doesn’t scale-well horizontally
• Featured Projects
– Neo4j http://neo4j.org/

37. Relational Data Stores
• Use when
– Your data Highly relational
– There is a need to break data into small pieces and
assemble it in different ways
– When consistence is king
– Access patterns are unknown
– Reporting
• Challenges
– Doesn’t scale-well horizontally
• Featured Projects
– Oracle http://www.oracle.com/index.html
– Postgres http://www.postgresql.org/
– Ms SQL Server http://dev.mysql.com/
– MySQL http://www.mysql.com/

38. How do you choose?

39. If It Doesn’t Fit, You Must Acquit!
• Data
– Does it have a natural structure?
– How it is connected to each other?
– How is it distributed?
– How much?
• Access Patterns
– Reads/Writes ratio?
– Uniform or random?
• CAP

40. Other Considerations
• Maturity
• Stability
• Maintainability
• Durability
• Cost
• Tools
• Familiarity

41. For Fairness’ Sake!

42. For Fairness’ Sake!
• Relational data stores did not fail us
– They actually perform very well
• We failed ourselves
– By using them as solutions for problems
they weren’t designed to solve to begin
with
• Take any data store and you’ll get as
much trouble

43. For Fairness’ Sake!
• You can’t expect
– A flathead screwdriver to work on a Philips
as well as one with the matching Philips
blade
– A crosshead screwdriver to work on
flathead screw

44. Polyglot Persistence

45. Polyglot Persistence
• Enterprise application are complex and
combine complex problems
– Assumption that we should use one data store is
absurd
– You can’t try to fit all in one model and expect no
problem
• Polyglot Persistence
– To leverage multiple data storages, based on the
way data is used by the application
• Associated with a learning curve
• Long term investment (More productive in the long-run)
– Leverage the strength of multiple data stores

46. Polyglot Persistence
• Example
– MongoDB for the product catalog
– Redis for shopping cart
– DynamoDB for social profile info
– Neo4j for the social graph
– HBase for inbox and public feed messages
– MySQL for payment and account info
– Cassandra for audit and activity log
• Disclaimer: I’m not making any
recommendation here.

47. NoSQL in the Cloud

48. NoSQL in the Cloud
• NoSQL as a commodity
– Fully managed data stores (No
maintenance)
– Elastic scaling
– Cheap storage
• Featured:
– Amazon AWS
– Heroku Add-ons
– CloudFoundry

49. As Promised!

50. The A’s the Q’s in the Abstract
• What does the rise of all these NoSQL mean
to my enterprise?
– I’m guessing a lot
• What is NoSQL to begin with?
– Any non-relational data store
• Does it mean “NO SQL”?
– No
• Could this be just another fad?
– I don’t think so

51. The A’s the Q’s in the Abstract
• Is a good idea to be the future of my
enterprise on these new exotic
technologies and simply abandon
proven mature RDBMS?
– It’s up to you. I will say “No guts, no glory!”
• How scalable is scalable?
– However much you need it to be

52. The A’s the Q’s in the Abstract
• Assuming that I am sold, how do I
choose the one that fits my needs the
best?
– I’ll tell you if you hire me
• Is there a middle ground somewhere?
– Polyglot Persistence
• What is this Polyglot Persistence I hear
about?
– It’s the middle ground

53. Any Other Questions?

54. Thank You All!
@PolymathicCoder