Abstract
Today, nearly all possible business activities or information systems in enterprises such as sales, marketing, accounting, finance, customer relations, and manufacturing are carried out through traditional relational database management systems. However, technological, social, and competitive pressures in enterprises coming together with the rapid change in technology and then the problems arising from traditional databases force enterprises to adopt new database technologies. This chapter aims to highlight the main differences between traditional relational databases and NoSQL databases and to present an overview of the concepts, features, potential, problems, benefits, and limitations of NoSQL databases for enterprise information management systems, for especially enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, which have a significant role in digital transformation of enterprises.
TopBackground
NoSQL was first introduced by Carlo Strozzi in 1998 as a name for his relational database without SQL interface. In 2009, Eric Evans has used it for the discussion of open source, distributed systems with non-relational databases (Kaur & Rani, 2013; Priyanka, 2016).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Vertical Scaling: Increasing memory, number of CPUs and cores of a computer to provide more data processing power.
Diverse Data: It refers to different types of storage of data. The data can be stored in three ways; (1) structured data that hold in tables on traditional relational databases, (2) unstructured data that hold in like xml files, csv files, (3) semi-structured data that hold in like doc, pdf, email, and post messages on social platforms.
MapReduce: A programming model that process large amounts of data stored in commodity machines for processing massive datasets in parallel.
Binary JavaScript Object Notation (BSON): A format for binary-coded serialization of JSON documents.
Big Data: A collection of huge amounts of real time data in very high volume, variety, and velocity in nature that cannot be managed effectively with traditional database management systems.
Horizontal Scaling: Adding new nodes (servers) to the system to increase the application workload without making any changes to the application.
JavaScript Object Notation (JSON): A text-based open standard format for exchanging data between applications.
NoSQL Systems: Non-relational, distributed database systems designed for big data storage and have capability to process data across a large number of commodity servers.