Explore our collection of useful NoSQL database resources to enhance your understanding of important NoSQL concepts and NoSQL trends, as well as access comprehensive NoSQL training resources.
Here are some essential books, papers, and articles to read when you’re getting started with NoSQL databases.
Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data: This is the seminal paper introducing Bigtable, a very early NoSQL datastore introduced in 2006. Bigtable, a distributed storage system for structured data, is the ancestor to many of today’s most popular NoSQL databases, such as Apache Cassandra.
Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store: This paper presents the design and implementation of Dynamo, a highly available and scalable distributed data store built for Amazon’s platform in 2007. Popular NoSQL databases such as Cassandra and DynamoDB both inherit from the Dynamo model.
An Introduction to Distributed Systems: In the NoSQL database community, Kyle Kingsbury and Jepsen are legendary for “breaking distributed systems so you don’t have to.” This guide is designed as notes for an in-depth course on distributed system fundamentals. If you’re working with a distributed NoSQL database, this is a great resource for learning about key distributed systems terms, an overview of the algorithmic landscape, and exploring production concerns.
Designing Data-Intensive Applications: This book’s description begins “NoSQL… Big Data… Scalability… CAP Theorem… Eventual Consistency… Sharding… Nice buzzwords, but how does the stuff actually work?” If you want a deep dive into the diverse and fast-changing landscape of technologies for storing and processing data, there’s no better resource available.
CAP Twelve Years Later: How the “Rules” Have Changed: Eric Brewer, the man who developed the well-known CAP theorem in 2000, revisits its “2 of 3” formulation 12 years later.
Seven Databases in Seven Weeks: A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement: This is likely the most comprehensive guide to the world of NoSQL databases, with in-depth practical and conceptual introductions to Redis, Neo4J, CouchDB, MongoDB, HBase, Postgres, and DynamoDB.
Cassandra: The Definitive Guide: Cassandra is one of the most widely used NoSQL databases, and this book is a great resource for getting started with Cassandra. It provides the technical details and practical examples you need to put Cassandra to work in a production environment.
NoSQL Distilled: Pramod Sadalage and Martin Fowler, a well-known pioneer of agile software development and self-proclaimed “general loud mouth on Software Development,” provide a concise but thorough introduction to NoSQL in this book. It covers data models, issues with distributed data, thinking about consistency, schema migration, and several examples of different styles of NoSQL databases. Bonus: Here’s a with all the key points summarized.
The following is a collection of data points from industry research papers on NoSQL databases, SQL, and other general database / NoSQL trends.
Source: Redgate
Source: Stackoverflow
Source: Stackoverflow
Source: Jetbrains
Source: Redgate
Source: IDC + Seagate
Here’s a list of vendor-neutral guides
Here is a compilation of free NoSQL training courses that we found. Note that we have not taken most of these courses, so we are sharing the provided course descriptions instead of writing our own.
Official Description: “Confused about NoSQL and how it differs from SQL? You’ve come to the right place! In this conceptual course (no coding required), you’ll be introduced to learn the four major NoSQL databases, including key-value, document, column family, and graph. You’ll learn about four popular NoSQL engines—including Redis, MongoDB, Apache Cassandra, and Neo4j—and when to apply them to achieve a specific business requirement. You’ll follow the data escapades of a fictional social network and learn how NoSQL can help them handle and extract insights from unstructured data like social posts. Lastly, you’ll study real use cases of when NoSQL databases were used—giving you the knowledge you need to effectively store data in any situation.”
Terms: “Start course for free”
Description: “This course will provide you with technical hands-on knowledge of NoSQL databases and Database-as-a-Service (DaaS) offerings. With the advent of Big Data and agile development methodologies, NoSQL databases have gained a lot of relevance in the database landscape. Their main advantage is the ability to effectively handle scalability and flexibility issues raised by modern applications.
You will start by learning the history and the basics of NoSQL databases and discover their key characteristics and benefits. You will learn about the four categories of NoSQL databases and how they differ from each other. You will explore the architecture and features of several different implementations of NoSQL databases, namely MongoDB, Cassandra, and IBM Cloudant. You will then get hands-on experience using those NoSQL databases to perform standard database management tasks, such as creating and replicating databases, loading and querying data, modifying database permissions, indexing and aggregating data, and sharding (or partitioning) data.”
Terms: “Enroll for free”
Description: “As the shiny new object in the data world, you might have heard a lot of people talk excitedly about NoSQL and all the things it can do. It’s great in terms of flexibility, speed, and is easy to work with. It’s super scalable, so it can accommodate increased numbers of users as websites and applications grow. But will it replace SQL? Will it make relational databases obsolete? In this course, Mel McGee explains just exactly what NoSQL is, the pros and cons, and tradeoffs you’ll make when using NoSQL. Mel takes a high-level approach without delving into the details of any one NoSQL query language or solution, so if you’re a developer looking for a bigger picture of NoSQL, or an entrepreneur wanting to explore options for your product, or just plain curious about non-relational databases, this course is for you.”
Terms: “Start free month”
Description: “ScyllaDB University is a series of intuitive NoSQL training courses designed as both a ScyllaDB tutorial and a resource for learning basic NoSQL concepts. Courses cover a variety of topics with emphasis on installing ScyllaDB, ScyllaDB in production, ScyllaDB Cloud and other NoSQL database training concepts – including ScyllaDB DBA training.
The ScyllaDB Essentials course is an introductory level course that explains the basics of ScyllaDB including information on NoSQL database fundamentals. By the end of this course, you will understand basic concepts of NoSQL databases. You will gain knowledge of ScyllaDB features and advantages, including ScyllaDB architecture, data model, and installation. This course is the foundation for other ScyllaDB training courses. The Data Modeling course is recommended after you complete the he ScyllaDB Essentials course.
This course is designated for Database Administrators, System Engineers, Developers and Architects who would like to understand NoSQL basics and how those apply to ScyllaDB. Anyone with a need for a highly available fast NoSQL database would benefit from this course.”
Description: “This course introduces you to NoSQL databases and the challenges they solve. Expert instructors will dive deep into Amazon DynamoDB topics such as recovery, SDKs, partition keys, security and encryption, global tables, stateless applications, streams, and best practices.
DynamoDB is a key-value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. It’s a fully managed, multiregion, multimaster database with built-in security, backup and restore, and in-memory caching for internet-scale applications. DynamoDB can handle more than 10 trillion requests per day and support peaks of more than 20 million requests per second.
This course uses a combination of video-based lectures delivered by Amazon Web Services expert technical trainers, demonstrations, and hands-on lab exercises, that you run in your own AWS account to enable you to build, deploy and manage your own DynamoDB-powered application.”
Terms: “Enroll for free”
In this section we have compiled some of the most trusted sources for general database / NoSQL news and NoSQL industry trendsto help you stay on top of all the latest innovation and events.
Apache® and Apache Cassandra® are either registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. Amazon DynamoDB® and Dynamo Accelerator® are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. No endorsements by The Apache Software Foundation or Amazon.com, Inc. are implied by the use of these marks.