Use Cases for Why Data Storage Challenges Businesses to Adopt NoSQL

In our last post, we began talking about NoSQL, a next-generation database technology that’s better equipped to handle exploding volumes of structured and unstructured data. We understand that there is no easy task given today's data storage challenges.

With NoSQL, you don’t have to store data in rigid columns and rows according to predefined schema. NoSQL databases are flexible and dynamic, and can be scaled horizontally across multiple servers.

Big data analytics is a primary use case for NoSQL.

Organizations can leverage NoSQL to create an operational data hub that aggregates all types of data, eliminating the silos that complicate analysis. NoSQL offers better performance than traditional databases, as well as improved availability and data consistency.  It also makes it possible to choose the data model — document, graph, tabular or key-value — that best fits the analysis.

According to Forrester Consulting, NoSQL is the ideal choice for next-gen cloud-based applications. Because the cloud is built upon an elastic pool of resources, data sources must be flexible and dynamic and deliver high levels of availability and performance. NoSQL fills the bill.

DataStax Enterprise (DSE) 5.0 is an enterprise-class NoSQL platform that delivers these capabilities along with advanced application development tools. Based upon Apache Cassandra 3.0, DSE supports tabular, key-value, JSON/document and graph models and includes built-in workload management functionality that enables analytics, search and in-memory operations within the same database. DSE 5.0 can scale out linearly to more than 1,000 nodes with no single point of failure, and can provide active-everywhere replication across multiple data centers and cloud environments.

Other features include:

• DSE Graph, a scalable real-time graph database built for cloud applications that need to manage complex and constantly changing data with many relationships
• DSE Advanced Replication, which is designed to support applications that need to replicate data within hub-and-spoke and similar topologies
• DSE Tiered Storage, which automatically moves data to its appropriate storage tier based upon age
• DSE Multi-Instance, which makes it easy and cost-efficient to run multiple copies of DSE on larger machines
• Integrated Apache Spark and Apache Solr, which provide advanced analytics and search functionality

DataStax OpsCenter 6.0 is a web-based visual management solution for large-scale, mission-critical systems. OpsCenter also delivers enterprise-class provisioning capabilities for creating and administering widely distributed database clusters, whether on-premises, in the cloud or in hybrid cloud environments. Integrated functionality for monitoring, tuning, backup and security management helps to reduce operational and hardware costs and increase productivity. Monitoring and alerting features include support for SNMP, which enables organizations to integrate OpsCenter with other infrastructure management systems. Monitoring metrics can also be exported to third-party monitoring tools.

DataStax offers a suite of development tools, along with drivers that natively support C/C++, C#, Java, Node.js, ODBC, Python, PHP and Ruby. DataStax DevCenter is a multiplatform visual tool for managing database schema, developing queries and tuning performance. DataStax Studio is a web-based tool that makes it easy to write graph database queries and visualize graph data output in a variety of formats.

Traditional databases simply weren’t designed for big data analytics and the cloud. DataStax is an enterprise-class distributed database platform built upon Apache Cassandra NoSQL that provides the resources needed to support next-gen, data-intensive applications.