Like another database scripting/query languages such as SQL, MySQL, and Oracle, MongoDB also provides a high performance, scalability as well as availability for managing the database. MongoDB is one of the most accepted NoSQL database and stores data in a JSON structure. It is what makes Mongo DB so scalable as well as flexible. In this chapter, you will learn about the concept of NoSQL and its types and benefits.
What is NoSQL Database?
NoSQL can be defined as a database which is employed for managing the massive collection of unstructured data and when your data is not piled up in a tabular format or relations like that of relational databases. The term NoSQL came from the word non SQL or nonrelational. There are a wide variety of existing Relational Databases that have been unsuccessful in solving several complex modern problems such as:
- A dynamic change in the nature of data - i.e., nowadays data are in structured, semi-structured, nonstructured as well as polymorphic in type.
- The variety of applications and the type of data feed into them for analysis has now become more diverse and distributed and is approaching cloud-oriented.
- Also, modern applications and services are serving tens of thousands of users in diverse geo-locations, having diverse time zones. So data integrity needs to be there at all the time.
Data residing in multiple virtual servers and other cloud storage (remote-based) in the cloud infrastructure can be easily analyzed using the NoSQL database management techniques and largely when the data set is in a non-structured manner. So, it can be said that the NoSQL database is intended to overcome the diversity of data, increase performance, modeling of data, scalability, and distribution, which is usually encountered in the Relational Databases.
Structured Data Vs. Unstructured Data
Structured data are in a proper format, usually text files or which can be represented in a tabular format. Also, such types of data can be smoothly represented in chart-like form, and data mining tools can be used to process them efficiently.
Whereas unstructured data are haphazard data formats (such as document files, image files, video files, icons, etc.) where structured data can be pulled out or mine from unstructured data, but this process usually takes a lot of time. Modern-day data generated from different applications, services, or sources are a combination of structured and unstructured both. So, you will need something to store such data to make your application work properly. NoSQL based languages and scripts can help in this regard.
Types of Database in NoSQL
Here are some of the common database types that come under NoSQL:
- Document type databases: Here, the key gets paired with a compound data structure, i.e., document. MongoDB is an example of such type.
- Key-Value stores: Here, each unstructured data is stored with a key for recognizing it.
- Graph stores: In this type of database, data is stored mostly for networked data. It helps to relate data based on some existing data.
- Wide-column stores: This type of data stores large data sets Cassandra (Used by Facebook), HBase are examples of such type.
Benefits of NoSQL Type Database
- It allows developers to create large volumes of structured, semi-structured as well as unstructured data for making the application diverse and not restricting its use because of the type of data being used within the application.
- It also allows agile development; rapid iteration along with frequent code pushes, which makes it more popular.
- It can be used with object-oriented programming (OOP), which makes it easy to use with flexibility.
- Data can be stored more efficiently, making it less expensive, providing massive architecture.