Changes

Since Google published its paper on BigTable in 2006, alternatives to the traditional relational database model have been growing in both variety and popularity. These new databases (often referred to as NoSQL databases) excel at handling problems faced by modern information systems that the traditional relational model cannot. They are particularly popular among organizations tackling the so-called "Big Data" problems. However, there are always tradeoffs involved when making such dramatic changes. Understanding how these different kinds of databases are designed and what they can offer is essential to the decision making process. In this precon I will discuss some of the various types of new databases (key-value, columnar, document, graph) and walk through examples or exercises using some of their open source implementations like Riak, HBase, CouchDBMongoDB, and Neo4j.