IBM DB2 General Architect: The future of the database is NoSQL

Memory computing, Hadoop and NoSQL are the three hotspots of large data analysis in the 2011. Curt Cotner, an IBM academician and DB2 General architect, said in a speech at the IOD2011 conference held in Las Vegas that the future direction of database development was the non-relational database NoSQL. At present, Google's BigTable and Amazon's dynamo are used NoSQL database, and the traditional relational database in dealing with ultra-high-scale, high concurrent SNS, web2.0 site has been powerless.

Curt Cotner, IBM Academician and DB2 General architect, addressed the IOD2011 conference

Traditional relational database in dealing with web2.0 Web site exposed a lot of difficult to overcome problems: web2.0 Web site to the user personalized information to generate real-time dynamic pages and provide dynamic information, the database concurrent load is very high, often to achieve tens of thousands of times per second read and write requests. Relational databases can handle tens of thousands of SQL queries, but with tens of thousands of requests for SQL write data, hard disk IO is already unbearable. For large SNS sites, daily users generate a huge amount of user dynamics, such as the current Facebook processing 10TB of data every day, Twitter processing 7TB daily, and the volume of these data daily growth. For relational databases, the efficiency of SQL queries in such a vast amount of information is extremely low and intolerable.

The most characteristic of relational database is transactional consistency: the traditional relational database reads and writes is the transaction, has the acid (atomicity atomicity, the consistency consistency, the isolation isolation, the persistence durability) The characteristic, C is the consistency (consistency), this feature is the soul of relational databases (the other three aid are serving them), which enables relational databases to be used in almost all systems that require consistency, such as a typical banking system. Another characteristic of relational database is that it has fixed table structure, so its expansibility is very poor, but in SNS, the system upgrades, the function increases, often means the data structure huge alteration, this point relational database also is difficult to cope with, needs the new structured data storage.

It is reported that the word NoSQL first appeared in 1998, Carlo Strozzi developed a lightweight, open source, does not provide SQL functions of the database. NoSQL broke the long-standing situation of relational database and acid theory unification. NoSQL data storage does not require a fixed table structure, and usually does not have connection operations, but has a performance advantage over large data access that is unmatched by relational databases.

Curt Cotner introduces several hot spots of database technology experience from the 90 's

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)