5 Pros and 5 Cons of NoSQL Databases

5 Up, 5 Down

For about two decades, the relational database (RDBMS) model was the only game in town for database management. Over the past few years, another game has emerged: NoSQL, a non-relational distributed database model. Read on to learn the top 5 benefits and the top 5 disadvantages.

While far from new -- the NoSQL concept has been around for 10 years or so -- NoSQL has been attracting a lot of attention in recent years, primarily due to big-name production implementations. Amazon�s Dynamo and Google�s BigTable are among the best known implementations.

While NoSQL offers a number of benefits, it is not without inevitable downsides.

Here are Five Benefits of NoSQL

It's Open Source - Mostly a Good Thing

Open source products provide developers with some great benefits, notably their no-cost status. Other benefits: open-source software tends to be more reliable, secure, and faster to deploy than proprietary alternatives.

Popular NoSQL DBs are Cassandra, CouchDB, Hbase, MongoDB, and Redis.

Elastic Scaling

NoSQL replaces the old 'scale up' mantra of database managers with a new one: 'scale out.' Instead of adding bigger servers to handle more data load, a NoSQL database allows a company to distribute the load across multiple hosts as the load increases.

Different NoSQL DBs for Different Projects

MongoDB and Redis are good choices for storing frequently-written, rarely read...

Read the rest of this NoSQL story at DatabaseJournal