NoSQL, Not only SQL, NewSQL: Are they same?

Last year, I wrote a post on NoSQL Document Database: What is NoSQL Document Database? What is Azure DocumentDB?, that speaks about Document Database and how it stores data. Although the post explains about NoSQL as well, it does not talk about other terms like Not Only SQL or NewSQL, hence thought to make a post on it.

NoSQL in simple term

We talk about NoSQL when we talk about different type of databases (or storage). In most cases, our projects were done with relational databases but for certain scenario, it needs a different structure to hold data, specifically when the data needs to hold is semi-structured or unstructured. As I mentioned in the previous post, it is not a new database type, it is as old as relational databases. In simple terms, NoSQL database is a non-relational database that allows us to store mainly large mount of semi-structured data.

NoSQL has become prevalent in recent years because;

• Previously-ignored-Big-Data has become the most important.
  Generally, applications built ignore some of the data not because of they are not important but difficult to process with traditional DBMSs. Large streams of data, semi-strucutured or unstrcutured data coming from various equipments are some of the examples. With modern technologies and techniques developed, it has become easy to process them, hence previously-ignored data needs to be captured and stored. This is one of the reasons for getting NoSQL databases are populated.
• Less-expensive-scaled-out solutions
  For processing large datasets, specifically data without a proper structure, it needs a good infrastructure solution. Initially, the required infrastructure was very expensive, but now, with powerful commodity hardware, virtualization technologies, cloud services, the cost has relativiely has gone down. Not only that, since some services can be taken on demand and pay as you go, the usage of them has become easy and affordable. This has definetly become another factor for higher usage of NoSQL.

Not Only SQL

Although NoSQL databases are non-relational, some of databases now support SQL as well, hence sometime they are referred as Not Only SQL.

NewSQL

The NewSQL represents relational database that offers NoSQL capabilities. It offers similar scalability and allows us to work with semi-structured and unstructured data as we do with NoSQL databases.

You can see types of NoSQL databases available with this link: http://nosql-database.org/