Choosing the right database for your application is no easy task.
You have a wide variety of options relational databases such as MySQL, or distributed NoSQL solutions such as MongoDB, Cassandra, and HBase. NoSQL has come to mean not only SQL as many distributed database systems do in fact support SQL-style queries, as long as you are not doing complex join operations and this further blurs the lines between these systems.
We will talk about how to analyze the requirements of your system in terms of consistency, availability, and partition-tolerance, and how to apply the CAP theorem to guide your choice after showing you where different database technologies fall on the sides of the CAP triangle. We will also talk about more practical considerations, such as your budget, need for professional support, and the ease of integration into the other systems already in place in your organization. Maybe you don’t even need a distributed storage solution at all! Choosing the right technology for your data storage will save you a lot of pain as your application grows and evolves and making the wrong choice can lead to all sorts of maintenance problems and wasted work.
Your instructor is Frank Kane of Sundog Education, bringing nine years of experience as a senior engineer and senior manager at Amazon.com and IMDb.com, where his job involved extracting meaning from their massive data sets, and processing that data in a highly distributed manner.
