Recent Advances and Benchmarking of NewSQL for OLTP and OLAP in the Big Data Age

While the never-ending debate between relational and NoSQL database is ongoing, a new competitor, NewSQL, has quietly entered the field. Introduced in 2011, NewSQL is not as popular as relational or NoSQL database. The main selling point of NewSQL is its ability to scale horizontally while preserving ACID properties and thus preserving the support to handle OLTP workloads. Given the active research and evolving developments of NewSQL in the last decade, this research paper aims to identify how far has NewSQL advanced to and how comparable is it to existing database systems in terms of On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) and On-Line Analytics Processing (OLAP) to accommodate big data. Three research questions have been formulated as part of the systemic literature review (SLR) followed by an experimental benchmarking to validate the results from the SLR. The results show that while NewSQL still has room to improve, it is definitely ready to be used in productions, albeit having certain obstacles which may need to be addressed such as expertise in deployment and maintenance, as well as performance. One limitation of this research is that the testing was conducted on a single node and future research could include performance testing on multiple nodes.