Some Environments in Which Remote DBA Experts Will Prefer To Use NoSQL Over SQL

Once employed only by very large enterprises like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, many smaller businesses have now adopted NoSQL databases for critical business applications. This is because they deliver better scalability and flexibility that is simply not possible by conventional relational database technologies. There are especially some application areas where NoSQL databases have demonstrated their superiority over traditional RDMS. Some notable examples:

Personalization

An increasing number of marketing companies are attempting to target their audiences in a better and more relevant way by customizing both their communication as well as product features. This sort of customization requires processing of a variety of data – behavioral, contextual, demographic, and more. The larger the volume of data that is available and processed, the more customized can be the customer experience. However, the typically large data volumes required to customize offers can overwhelm a conventional relational database. Since a NoSQL database can be very easily scaled up to meet increasing data volumes and to enable updating the profiles of visitors, it can deliver the typically low latency that is required for customer engagement on a real time basis.

Management of Profiles

Profile management is fundamental to applications running on the web and mobile platforms for functions such as enabling online transactions, user authentication, registering user preferences, and lots more. In large scale businesses, these applications need to support users running into hundreds of millions. Since conventional relational databases are restricted to a single server, the number of user profiles that they can process is severely limited. However, in a distributed database environment that is easily supported by NoSQL databases, the same load can be farmed out on multiple servers making it very easy to process. Also, the use of commodity servers makes the scaling up easier and less expensive – this is something, which enables remote DBA experts to price their packages more attractively even when data volumes are very large.

Big Data Availability in Real Time

In order for businesses to be agile operationally, it is critical for them to be able to extract information in real-time from operational data. This ability not only enhances operational efficiency but also reduces costs and boosts revenue as enterprises are able to act almost instantaneously on current data. Earlier, the databases required for operations and business analytics were required to be in different environments – the applications were powered by the operational database while the business intelligence and management reporting were enabled by the analytical database. The deployment of NoSQL database by remote DBA experts has made it possible for both front-end and back-end operations to be managed on the same database, thus increasing transactional efficiency.

Content Management

Content becomes relevant and useful to users only when the content managers are able to draw on a number of sources, aggregate it and offer it to the customers in a way that is interesting and useful. Since NoSQL databases can handle all types of documents without any restrictions, they are ideal for managing content that may be unstructured, semi-structured, or structured. This is because technically users do not have to define the data model beforehand in NoSQL databases. Having this flexibility at their disposal enables content managers to play around with the presentation of the content and even include user-generated content in the form of comments, videos, images that are posted on the increasingly popular social media platforms.

Mobile Apps

With the population of smartphone users surging every day, it is very important for mobile applications to handle issues of scalability because, given the right circumstances, it is possible for a mobile app to have tens of millions of users in just a few months of being launched. With the advantage of a distributed database available with NoSQL, it is possible for app developers to start small and then be able to scale up rapidly when needed. This comes across as a major advantage because the conventional relational databases did not allow that and required large and thus expensive servers to be used from the very start.

Conclusion

NoSQL is a perfect fit for databases that need a high degree of scalability because of the requirement to handle a large amount of data in the near or distant future. Another major advantage of NoSQL databases is that they are entirely dynamic, meaning it is very easy to alter the structure of the database as per requirement without causing any harm to the data or any issues related to structuring, formatting or migration.