Friday, March 29, 2024

NoSQL Is Not An Option

Twitter’s recent announcement that they were moving from MySQL to the Java-based NoSQL Cassandra database has caused many to embrace what they call the NoSQL movement. First coined in 1998, NoSQL originally stood for Not Only SQL–and it’s also not a relational database.


Today, NoSQL databases are actually distributed data stores which are designed with very large scale data access requirements–such as Facebook. Cassandra, the most popular NoSQL database, got its start as Facebook’s proprietary database. The social networking company made it open source in 2008, and opened the doors for others to begin using it.


Large sites, such as Twitter, handles huge amounts of data storage and data writes each day–in Twitter’s case, 7 TB (that’s terabytes) of data per day. Handling such a large amount of data can be difficult for relational databases. The difference is that NoSQL’s distributed data stores are able to scale the data by distributing it across multiple nodes horizontally.

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