Dynamo and BigTable — Review and comparison

For a long time, relational database management systems have been the only solution for persistent data storage. However, with the phenomenal growth of data, this conventional way of storing has become problematic. To manage the exponentially growing data volumes, the largest information technology companies, such as Google and Amazon, have developed alternative solutions that store data in what have come to be known as NoSQL databases. Some of the NoSQL features are flexible schema, horizontal scaling and relaxed consistency. NoSQL databases store and replicate data in distributed systems, thereby achieving scalability and high availability. In this paper two NoSQL databases are reviewed and compared: Amazon's Dynamo and Google's BigTable.