So often, we return to using the right tool for the job, but it’s good to see that MySQL is still quite useful for the general case. The corollary is that it’s rare to find a magic bullet–so don’t expect a wholesale switch to NoSQL to solve your performance issues.
A vendor-independent comparison of NoSQL databases: Cassandra, HBase, MongoDB, Riak
In 2010, when the world became enchanted by the capabilities of cloud systems and new databases designed to serve them, a group of researchers from Yahoo decided to look into NoSQL. They developed the YCSB framework to assess the performance of new tools and find the best cases for their use. The results were published in the paper, “Benchmarking Cloud Serving Systems with YCSB.”
The Yahoo guys did a great job, but like any paper, it could not include everything:
- The research did not provide all the information we needed for our own analysis.
- Though Cassandra, HBase, Yahoo’s PNUTS, and a simple sharded MySQL implementation were analyzed, some of the databases we often work with were not covered.
- Yahoo used high-performance hardware, while it would be more useful for most companies to see how these databases perform on average hardware.