Learn SQL and NoSQL - Build IT Masters

In this article, we are going to discuss what is SQL and what is NoSQL. In the era of information, data plays a important part. Today data worth to anyone more than anything. In this data-driven world, developers have to deal with many types of data types. They need to retrieving and storing data as fastest as they can, So let’s start “Learn SQL and NoSQL” article.

What is SQL? #step01 in Learn SQL and NoSQL

SQL is a programming language which stands for Structured Query Language that is used to communicate with relational database. Queries in SQL are used to perform tasks such as update data on a database, manipulating, retrieve or delete and other operations in programming part.

RDBMS is considered to be the basis for SQL, and for all modern database systems such as MS SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, and Microsoft Access are considered to be the basis for SQL. Here, tables can broken into entities called fields. The database is most often containing one or more tables. Each table has many rows and each row can be identified using a unique key.

Let’s see what are the advantages when using SQL

Suitable for relational Databases.
pre-defined schema
Normalization
Removing redundancy
Transactions in SQL databases
single standardized language

So we need to know what are the disadvantages when we are using SQL.

Process of Interfacing is complex
SQL occupies space
Handling big data is very costly

However, In 1979, Oracle became the first to incorporate an SQL language into its relational database. SQL has become the standard language for querying and manipulating data stored in a relational database.

What is NoSQL? – #step02 in Learn SQL and NoSQL

As you can see the title also told No SQL. It says that it does not stand for No SQL, we can say “Not only SQL”. And this NoSQL allows high performance and agile processing of information at a bigger scale. that is better.

NoSQL is a non-relational database, which means it has no tables. So that does not need a fixed schema and developers does not have to deal with all the troubles of deciding what are the columns, data types and other schemas. This is widely used in big data and real-time web applications.

In the past, SQL was the basic model for database management in relational once. RDBMS uses SQL syntax to store and retrieve data. But with NoSQL structured, data can be stored across multiple processing nodes. Also it does not require fixed table as I mention above.

There are some type in NoSQL databases. Let’s see what are the types.

Document databases – Store data similar to Json or JS object notation.
Column databases – Optimized for reading and writing data in columns instead of rows.
Key Value databases – Simple type of NoSQL DB, data is divided into key and a value pair.
Cache System – This is also a key value DB, but this is used as a cache system for temporary values.
Graph databases – Everything in a graph DB is looked at a node and relationship with other nodes.

Different between SQL and NoSQL

SQL databases are vertically scalable and the NoSQL databases is a horizontally scalable.

Scalability is the capability of a system, network, or process to handle a growing amount of work, or its potential to be enlarged to accommodate that growth.
— Wikipedia

And we can say NoSQL is non relationa. it means no schema ( schema free ). This is open source. because of that Organizations are turning to scale-out architectures using open software technologies.

Social network like Facebook, Amazon, and Google who handles a huge amount of data uses the concept of NoSQL.

When using RDBMS to deal with a huge volume of data, the response time of the system becomes slower and to handle this, the system must be scaled up which is an expensive scenario. But as a solution, the method of scaling out can be used where the database load is distributed on multiple hosts, whenever the load gets increase.

Why we use NoSQL?

The main reason is this is a ElasticSearch services. It means this is a integrate database using that kind of a services and the other one is other relatonal databases are not designed to run efficiently on clusters.

Let’s see what are the features of NoSQL.

Database does not follow the relational schema (schema free) and no complex features like query languages.
Multiple NoSQL DB can be executed in the Distributed mechanism
Provide eventual consistency to multiple DB s.
Less coordination and high distributions
As I said, this is schema free and there is no requirement for the definition of the schema of data.

What are the benefits in NoSQL?

More scalable and handles Big Data.
Relational model is not designed and there is Data models and the developers don not need a pre-defined schema to work with NoSQL DB. This makes storing retrieving manipulating data.
valid Object Oriented Programming concepts
No need to handle data structure in the data layer. That means eliminates the need for a specific caching layer to store data.
Cheaper to manage. That means simple to implement than using RDBMS.
Easier to scale and easy replications.
Support key developer language and platforms.

Choosing a database needed for our work is up to our preferences and need. Although it has been used SQL in most of the primary instances, NoSQL is now gaining more popularity and we can see the reasons from above mentioned topics.

Let’s see the main example of NoSQL. it is Mongo DB.

What is MongoDB?

This is a NoSQL document database with the scalability that we want with the querying. It means they stores data as documents like JSON, XML in the map. This is very simple for the developers to learn and use. It support for 10+ languages. you can refer mongodb.com

This is a horizontally scalable with native sharing. This has management tools to automation, monitoring and backups. So developer can use is easily.

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