NoSQL ​

The “I404C – NoSQL” activity is part of the “I4040 – Database Management System” course taught to students of first year master in computer science industrial engineer at the ECAM Brussels Engineering School (ECAM). This activity is about NoSQL models and databases and, in addition to presenting the four main models, it covers NoSQL specific characteristics and properties.

Course organisation ​

I gave this activity from 2016 to 2019, for four times. The activity was taught in French, but the material created for it are either in English or in French.

Originally, the activity was given in a traditional way with ten lecture sessions and a small project students had to work on. In 2019, I began transforming the activity following the competency based assessment approach that I started to develop that year.

Documents ​

• General information about the activity
• Competency Based Assessment
• Grid of competencies to acquire

Theory ​

• Session 1: NoSQL vs SQL: History and Evolution
• Session 2: Key-Value Model: Riak, Memcached, Redis
• Session 3: Column-Oriented Model: Cassandra, HBase
• Session 4: Graph-Oriented Model: Neo4j, OrientDB
• Session 5: Document-Oriented Model: CouchDB, MongoDB
• Session 6: Interfacing with a NoSQL Engine
• Session 7: Data Consistency
• Session 8: Operations on Data with NoSQL
• Session 9: Deploying a NoSQL Database
• Session 10: Beyond NoSQL

Practice ​

• Work: Deploying and using a NoSQL database

Resources ​

This section gathers resources that have been used to create this activity. These latter can be used to learn more about NoSQL databases.

Official book ​

• Sébastien Combéfis. (to be published). Découvrir NoSQL et s'initier au big data et à l'analyse de données. UKO Publication.

Reference books ​

• Pramod J. Sadarage and Martin Fowler. (2012). NoSQL Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Emerging World of Polyglot Persistence. Addison-Wesley. (ISBN: 978-0-321-82662-6)
• Rudi Bruchez. (2015). Les bases de données NoSQL et le Big Data : Comprendre et mettre en œuvre (2nd edition). Eyrolles. (ISBN: 978-2-212-14155-9)
• Guy Harrison. (2015). Next Generation Databases: NoSQL, NewSQL, and Big Data. Apress. (ISBN: 978-1-484-21330-8)

Other books ​

• Dan Sullivan. (2015). NoSQL for Mere Mortals. Addison-Wesley. (ISBN: 978-0-134-02321-2)
• Luc Perkins, Eric Redmond and Jim Wilson. (2018). Seven Databases in Seven Weeks: A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement (2nd edition). Pragmatic Bookshelf. (ISBN: 978-1-680-50253-4)
• Dan McCreary and Ann Kelly. (2013). Making Sense of NoSQL: A Guide for Managers and the Rest of us. Manning Publications. (ISBN: 978-1-617-29107-4)

Scientific references ​

• Ali Davoudian, Liu Chen and Mengchi Liu. A Survey on NoSQL Stores. In ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 51(2):1-43, 2018.
• Alejandro Corbellini, Cristian Mateos, Alejandro Zunino, Daniela Godoy and Silvia Schiaffino. Persisting big-data: The NoSQL landscape. In Information Systems, 63:1-23, 2017.
• Felix Gessert, Wolfram Wingerath, Steffen Friedrich and Norbert Ritter. NoSQL Database Systems: A Survey and Decision Guidance. In Computer Science - Research and Development, 32(3-4):353-365, 2017.
• Antonios Makris, Konstantinos Tserpes, Vassiliki Andronikou and Dimosthenis Anagnostopoulos. A Classification of NoSQL Data Stores Based on Key Design Characteristics. In Procedia Computer Science, 97, 94-103, 2016.
• Rashid Zafar, Eiad Yafi, Megat F. Zuhairi and Hassan Dao. BigData: The NoSQL and RDBMS review. In Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Information and Communication Technology (ICICTM), 120-126, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, May 2016.

Online resources ​

• NoSQL Databases: Your Ultimate Guide to the Non-Relational Universe!, Stefan Edlich.
• NoSQL • myNoSQL, Alex Popescu and Ana-Maria Bacalu.
• The Big Data Open Source Tools Landscape, Datafloq, 30 September 2014.