Seven Databases in Seven Weeks, 2nd Edition

Making a Choice

As we said at the beginning, data is like oil. We sit upon a vast ocean of data, yet until it’s refined into information, it’s unusable (and with a more crude comparison, no pun intended, there’s a lot of money in data these days). The ease of collecting and ultimately storing, mining, and refining the data out there starts with the database you choose.

Deciding which database to choose is often more complex than merely considering which genre maps best to a given domain’s data. Though a social graph may seem to clearly function best with a graph database, if you’re Facebook, you simply have far too much data to choose one. You are more likely going to choose a “Big Data” implementation, such as HBase or DynamoDB. This will ...