Developing an app has become an increasingly attainable goal for many businesses. As our post on ‘Why App Development Costs Are Coming Down’ explains, it is now a low-cost route to better customer engagement and customer satisfaction.
Meanwhile, NoSQL databases have been rising in popularity since Carlo Strozzi first coined the term in 1998.
Whether you take this to mean “no SQL” or “not only SQL”, NoSQL databases offer incredibly powerful solutions for development objectives because they are flexible, scalable, and versatile.
As data gathering becomes more and more expansive, and the cost of data storage falls, these are exactly what you want when you’re developing an app.
If you’re ready to dive into NoSQL databases and learn how they can power your applications, read on to discover all you need to know to pick the right one.
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What sort of data are you storing?
One of the greatest strengths of NoSQL databases is the ability to store huge amounts of data. But the sort of data you’re working on will help the decision-making process when it comes to picking a NoSQL database for your app.
There are several to pick from. MongoDB’s guide to NoSQL databases outlines four types of NoSQL databases: Key-value databases, document databases, wide column databases, and graph databases.
If you’re looking for high availability and low-latency, for example for a retail application, a key-value database might be right for you.
If you want to log events or content and have the option of in-depth analytical processing, a document database could be the right choice. Wide-column databases are ideally suited for apps that count or categorize analytic data.
And if you’re working on an app that relies on the interconnectedness of data elements – like social media networks – a graph database could be the best choice
What’s the latency requirement?
How much latency matters to your app? Mozilla’s Developer Network’s overview of latency defines it as the time it takes a packet of information to get from source to destination.
So if you’re going to be streaming data capture or sharing data in real-time, you’ll want a very low latency and a key-value solution is likely to be a good option for you.
But if the data you’re working with varies significantly in form, with more information attached to some objects than others or the types of information attached to each object changing over time, then a document database could be a better choice.
This means surrendering some of the minuscule latency offered by key-value databases, but in exchange, your app will be able to manage complex combinations of data.
How important is scaling?
Scalability is another great strength of NoSQL databases. NoSQL databases offer great potential for horizontal scaling, for example if you want to add more data to objects in the future.
Because NoSQL databases break down data into segments – or “shards” – they are very useful when it comes to large deployments which run terabytes of data.
Relational databases focus on data consistency, as explained in TechTarget’s overview of relational databases, but NoSQL databases allow the developer to choose data consistency to be eventually consistent – and this allows you to scale quickly and still deliver an app that performs to a high standard.
Not only do apps need to access increasingly large amounts of data, they are also now playing a part in capturing data for databases.
We’ve explored this in ‘The Evolution of Mobile Document Scanning Apps’ – everyone now carries a data capture device in their pocket but what it captures is unstructured.
NoSQL databases, especially document databases, are ideally placed to handle this data and scale to respond to changes in what’s captured and how it’s used.