A comparative study of relational database and key-value database for big data applications

Nowadays, Demands of web scale are in increasing and growing rapidly. Mobile applications, web technologies, social media always generates unstructured data that had lead to the advent of various NoSQL databases. Therefore, Big data applications are necessary to have an efficient technology to collect these data. However, a relational database is the traditional database that always uses in many applications and still has more valuable to play a significant role in the current information system. The main characteristics of NoSQL databases are schema-free, no relationship, no need to join as a relational database. The business organization expects that NoSQL database has better performance than a relational database. In This paper, we aim to compare the performance of Redis, which is a key-value database, one kind of NoSQL database, and MariaDB, which is a popular relational database. We designed a set of experiments with a large amount of data and compared the efficiency of the insert, update, delete and select transactions from various aspects on the same dataset. We measure the processing time of each transaction to evaluate the comparison. The results have shown that Redis has better runtime performance for insert, delete, update transaction under a specific condition or complex queries. MariaDB still is good for some conditions especially when we have a small data. Our study can help to choose a database that will be suitable for the real world applications because relational databases and NoSQL databases have different strengths and weakness.