Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/98946
www.iltanet.org The departure from a traditional data model allows us to think about and model our data in new and exciting ways. today. Lotus Domino/Notes is a multivalued document database platform that has been available since the late 1980s. The NoSQL databases that have arisen recently are mostly open source. Most of them use weak data typing, and it's usually the application programmer's job to handle the conversions. In many cases, the departure from a traditional data model allows us to think about and model our data in new and exciting ways. Because of this, NoSQL databases are generally very popular with developers. Many things like strict data typing, joins and referential integrity are now moved away from the database layer to the application data-tier layer. Schema is weakly enforced generally, and most NoSQL databases follow the basically available, soft state, eventually consistent (BASE) model as opposed to the atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability (ACID) transaction model. BASE offers a relaxed, best effort approach to handling transactions. For many applications and types of data, this is sufficient. However, for financial or inventory transactions, NoSQL generally will not be acceptable. Some businesses that have embraced the NoSQL model use a relational database for these types of transactions. 38 ILTA White Paper How NoSQL Came To Be The market forces that have led to the rise of the NoSQL movement have been quite subtle. Ten years ago, at the height of the dotcom Internet boom, most websites were powered by a relational database. In those days, the query patterns were largely predictable and tunable. Throughout the past decade, the rise of social networks has led to scalability problems at Facebook, Amazon and Google. These Internet kingpins realized that massively scalable databases simply did not exist. In order to scale their sites and infrastructure, they had to write their own database platforms. Google began work on Bigtable in 2004. Bigtable is a distributed storage system that now powers most of Google's applications. A landmark white paper describing the technology appeared in 2006. In parallel, Amazon built Dynamo, a massively scalable key-value-pair storage system. They documented their work in a popular 2007 white paper. Today Dynamo powers much of the Amazon Web Services infrastructure and is available for use by the general public. These two software projects have had much influence on the rise of distributed, horizontally scalable storage databases that today can be called NoSQL.