Databases should be chosen to match your company’s strategy.

They are the hidden workhorses of many organizations’ IT systems, holding critical business intelligence and carrying out hundreds of thousands of transactions each day.

In many ways, the database has become a commodity. Products differ on price, performance, ease of database administration and functionality.
There is a huge choice of database management systems (DBMS), which includes Open-source, NoSQL, and Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). In order to successfully choose which DBMS is right for your project or organization, it is vital that you understand exactly what the implications are with each one.

More and more companies are discovering that they do not need a relational database as a foundation to their application.

Relational databases are modeled in a tabular format, which allows one to accommodate various levels of normalization, i.e. how redundant the data is be within the database.  This also allows for data to be relational via keys (foreign, surrogate, natural keys) to account for data integrity.

For applications with unstructured data, or data stores where records to not need to share the exact same characteristics, NoSQL databases would be better options than relational databases.  Because NoSQL databases do not have to manage transaction consistency, they can yield very high performance writes and can scale much better.  You may have heard of DynamoDB, Cassandara and MongoDB.  They all use node clustering technology to spread the load of transactions across multiple smaller commodity servers, which is ideal for horizontal scale-out of unlimited data feeds.  Companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter leverage NoSQL a lot. A billing or real-time financial application would not be a good fit.

Recently, a hybrid database format has emerged, offering some of the SQL functionality such as relational data models and transactional consistency as well as the speed and scalability of NoSQL.  While these don’t yield quite the same high performance numbers as true NoSQL databases, they do handle modest transactional loads.  In theory, these NewSQL databases should be able to manage a fast-paced, real-time application with high transaction rate better than NoSQL databases.

At FlockNet we have expert Database Administrators and Developers that can help you navigate this complex world of databases. We will map your needs to the appropriate DBMS, ensuring that you are fitted with the software that is right for you. Call us today to discuss your web, software and database needs.