Pramod and Martincover the key questions surrounding NoSQL very well, starting with the obvious"Why NoSQL?" and moving on to the fundamentals: what is a documentdatabase, a column-family data store, or a graph database? But it goes muchdeeper than that.

Review

In this post I am going to review Pramod J. Sadalage and Martin Fowler'snew book entitled "NoSQL Distilled - A Brief Guide to the Emerging Worldof Polyglot Persistence."

An Overview

Pramod and Martin cover the key questions surrounding NoSQL very well,starting with the obvious "Why NoSQL?" and moving on to thefundamentals: what is a document database, a column-family data store, or agraph database? But it goes much deeper than that.If you have studied much about NoSQL databases or any type of data-storethen phrases such as "The CAP Theorem" and "Map-Reduce"will be familiar to you.

If you are not, then there are good explanations toget you up to speed. "CAP Theorem" covers about 4 pages with diagram.This book builds on these topics as they look at consistency, transactions,query features, data structures and scalability of each of the different datastorage types.NoSQL databases covered in this book include Riak, MongoDB, Cassandra,HBase and many others. CouchDB, Terrastore, OrientDB, and RavenDB arementioned, too.

In fact, if you just look at the book's index, it seems thatthere is at least one mention of every data-store known to man. These authorsknow them all and touch on them at just the right time so that you see wherethey fit in the world. It is, as they describe, "a broad survey of theNoSQL world.”Generally, in each topic area such as the discussion on "column-families,” one data-stored is chosen to take the lead for the purpose ofexplanation and demonstration. In the case of "column-families” it is Cassandra that gets the spotlight.

It is pointed out that HBase,Hypertable, and Amazon DynamoDB also use column-families, but the focus is onthe fundamentals rather than the specific technology solution.I particularly like the "Suitable Use Cases" and "WhenNot to Use" sections in the chapters "Key-Value Databases,” "Document Databases,” "Column-Family Stores" and"Graph Databases.” Just reading these sections will tell youquickly if your choice of technology is a good one or not.Most chapters conclude with some "Further Reading" andcoverage of the "Key Points,” so you can be sure to hone your knowledgein each topic area.