Thinking Outside the Table: What You Need to Know About NoSQL Databases

What do you want to accomplish with your data? Until recently, you could do a lot, but you essentially had only one tool, namely a relational database. RDBMs are great, and perfect for lots of important tasks, but there are also many things they can't do, or don't do very well, like managing unstructured data, and achieving high-performance at web scale. With the emerging popularity of NoSQL databases, you can now work with different tools that are built for different purposes, and select best-of-breed solutions to address all sorts of data requirements.

Do you need the radical performance and scalability of a key value store like Cassandra? Or the unstructured document handling of MongoDB and Couchbase? Or maybe the special network analysis capabilities of a graph-based product like Neo4j or Infinitegraph? In this session, we'll talk about the different capabilities of each of these major classes of NoSQL databases, briefly review the data models they deploy deploy and look at some use cases to understand which type is useful and when.

If you're going to understand big data architectures, you have to understand NoSQL databases, which means this session is not to be missed.

Tim is a teacher, author, and technology leader with DataStax. He is a conference speaker internationally and in the United States, and contributes to the Denver, Colorado tech community as president of the Denver Open Source User Group. He is the co-presenter of various O’Reilly training videos on topics ranging from Git to Mac OS X Productivity Tips to Apache Cassandra, and is the author of Gradle Beyond the Basics. He blogs very occasionally at http://timberglund.com, and lives in Littleton, CO, USA with the wife of his youth and their three children.