Advantages and Disadvantages of NoSQL Databases

What are the advantages of NoSQL?

Like every other technology, NoSQL databases also offer some benefits and suffer from some limitations too.

In an era where relational databases are mainly used for data storage and retrieval, modern web technologies posed a major challenge in the form of unstructured data, high scale data, enormous concurrency etc.

Relational databases struggled especially to represent highly unstructured data and high scalability and thus came into being the NoSQL databases.

Let us briefly discuss some advantages and disadvantages of NoSQL databases.

Major advantages of NoSQL databases include:

(i) Flexible Data Model:

NoSQL databases are highly flexible as they can store and combine any type of data, both structured and unstructured, unlike relational databases that can store data in a structured way only.

(ii) Evolving Data Model :

NoSQL databases allow you to dynamically update the schema to evolve with changing requirements while ensuring that it would cause no interruption or downtime to your application.

(iii) Elastic Scalability:

NoSQL databases can scale to accommodate any type of data growth while maintaining low cost.

(iv) High Performance:

NoSQL databases are built for great performance, measured in terms of both throughput (it is a measure of overall performance) and latency (it is the delay between request and actual response).

(v) Open-source:

NoSQL databases don’t require expensive licensing fees and can run on inexpensive hardware, rendering their deployment cost-effective.

Major disadvantages of NoSQL databases are:

(i) Lack of Standardization:

There is no standard that defines rules and roles of NoSQL databases. The design and query languages of NoSQL databases vary widely between different NoSQL products – much more widely than they do among traditional SQL databases.

(ii) Backup of Database:

Backups are a drawback in NoSQL databases. Though some NoSQL databases like MongoDB provide some tools for backup, these tools are not mature enough to ensure proper complete data backup solution.

(iii) Consistency:

NoSQL puts a scalability and performance first but when it comes to a consistency of the data NoSQL doesn’t take much consideration so it makes it little insecure as compared to the relational database e.g., in NoSQL databases if you enter same set of data again, it will take it without issuing any error whereas relational databases ensure that no duplicate rows get entry in databases.

Now that you have an idea of what NoSQL databases are.