Comparison of Relational Database with Document-Oriented Database (MongoDB) for Big Data Applications

Database can accommodate a very large number of users on an on-demand basis. The main limitations with conventional relational database management systems (RDBMS) are that they are hard to scale with Data warehousing, Grid, Web 2.0 and Cloud applications, have non-linear query execution time, have unstable query plans and have static schema. Even though RDBMS's have provided database users with the best mix of simplicity, robustness, flexibility, performance, scalability and compatibility but they are not able to satisfy the present day users and applications for the reasons mentioned above. The next generation NonSQL (NoSQL) databases are mostly non-relational, distributed and horizontally scalable and are able to satisfy most of the needs of the present day applications. The main characteristics of these databases are schema-free, no join, non-relational, easy replication support, simple API and eventually consistent. The aim of this paper is to illustrate how a problem being solved using MySQL will perform when MongoDB is used on a Big data dataset. The results are encouraging and clearly showcase the comparisons made. Queries are executed on a big data airlines database using both MongoDB and MySQL. Select, update, delete and insert queries are executed and performance is evaluated.