A comprehensive comparison of NOSQL and relational database management systems

In the last four 'decades, relational database management systems have been used widely to manage structured data in different disciplines. Nowadays, data resources increase rapidly in different forms (including structured, semi-structured and even unstructured data), requiring us to find another way to manage data. NoSQL database management systems previously were exhibited a few years ago, to meet the requirements of a variety of data forms. Many papers, and blogs have claimed that there is a trade-off between using relational database systems and non-relational database systems (NoSQL). In this study, we propose a novel investigation of the performance of relational and non-relational database systems in terms of the main operations that every database performs, such as insertion, reading, updating, and deleting by using the recent version of Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark (YCSB-0.9.0) in order to evaluate the performance of MySQL (RDBM) versus Mongo DB and Apache Cassandra (NoSQL). A testing environment is set up for each workload and the responses for each database management system used in the study are examined for each workload. It is worth mentioning that, although we use the latest version of Yahoo Cloud Serving Benchmark, it does not support the latest release of most database management systems, be they relational or non-relational. The results of this study show that the performance of each system differs due to the differences in their respective data storing mechanisms. In addition, the results of this study present the weaknesses and strengths of each database system used in the study.