Experimental Evaluation of NoSQL Databases

Abstract

Relational databases are a technology used universally that enables storage, management and retrieval of varied data schemas. However, execution of requests can become a lengthy and inefficient process for some large databases. Moreover, storing large amounts of data requires servers with larger capacities and scalability capabilities. Relational databases have limitations to deal with scalability for large volumes of data. On the other hand, non-relational database technologies, also known as NoSQL, were developed to better meet the needs of key-value storage of large amounts of records. But there is a large amount of NoSQL candidates, and most have not been compared thoroughly yet. The purpose of this paper is to compare different NoSQL databases, to evaluate their performance according to the typical use for storing and retrieving data. We tested 10 NoSQL databases with Yahoo! Cloud Serving Benchmark using a mix of operations to better understand the capability of non-relational databases for handling different requests, and to understand how performance is affected by each database type and their internal mechanisms.