Like many others i am not a big fan of SQL databases available today. But every application needs some or the other ways to persist the information. Being a Java programmer there are many options available to avoid raw SQL interaction during the development through Hibernate, JDO or JPA. But these all at the end lands at relational database only.
Soon i started gaining familiarity with the Google Bigtable and Amazon Dynamo for their non-relational approach and why relational database will not help for their kind of applications. Well the approach was shocking and different but fascinated and proven at the same time. Meanwhile many developers realized that they might need different kind of database altogether to help their applications grow and respond faster.
This realization resulted into many unorthodox, simple yet powerful databases which now-a-days falls into the Social Database category.
Neo4j is a graph database. It is an embedded, disk-based, fully transactional Java persistence engine that stores data structures rather than in tables. The database is quite small in size, approx <500k jar. It provides objected-oriented API to interact with the database.
Besides such a small database, Neo4j provides all the usual database features like ACID transaction, durable persistence, transaction recovery and concurrency control.
For further information you can look out this presentation video and slides by Neo4j creator.
Cassandra is a highly scallable second-generation distributed key-value based database. Initially developed at Facebook and now resides in Apache Incubator. Cassandra combines best features from Amazon Dynamo and Google Bigtable. Cassandra just like Neo4j is tested and proven for high-volume, high-transaction environments. Companies like Facebook, Twitter, Cisco, Mahalo and many more uses Cassandra in their applications.
Cassandra follows the decentralized model where every node in the cluster is having identical information so there is no single point failure. Like many clustered databases, Cassandra follows the Eventually Consistent model and supports advanced features like Read Repair and Hinted Handoff to minimize inconsistency windows.
There are lot of presentations for the same can be found at SlideShare.net.
I have just started my working on this new kind of database. FluidDB is a hosted online cloud database. FluidDB follows the Wiki kind of approach where either user or application can created objects and modify the existing objects. Though it doesn't follow the Wiki model as it is and maintains certain restriction like permission and strict data type. It provides an efficient query mechanism to search through the database. The database provides simple HTTP request API for access.
The database is in the private alpha as of now and you might get an access after sending the FluidDB team a mail API access request. As such i have not explored the database fully but there are plenty of ways this database can be used in today's applications.
Tickery is a simple Twitter based application developed by team FluidDB team for demonstration purpose.
With the growing amount of social applications and their complexities we might see varying amount of databases for different requires over the period of time.
Though these databases will not help you remove the relational databases altogether but will help you deliver the desired complex functionalities fast, easy and with less pain.
Though these databases will not help you remove the relational databases altogether but will help you deliver the desired complex functionalities fast, easy and with less pain.
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