Empirical Investigation of Trends in NoSQL-Based Big-Data Solutions in the Last Decade

The usage and popularity of NoSQL databases have sharply risen over the past decade due to their ability to handle a huge amount of data by employing scalable architecture, high availability and better performance than traditional relational database systems (RDBMS). In addition to reporting dynamics in NoSQL-database world, this paper focuses on presenting results from the perspective of developers. Stack Overflow provides a comprehensive technical niche with about 15 million technical questions, 8.1 million users and 25 million answers. In this paper, we aim to study variation in yearly trends of 20 NoSQL databases. To reveal the interest of the programmers we have investigated questions-asked and presented an unbiased Normal Interest Score by employing three parameters, first, the number of questions asked, second, mean views on a question and third, the mean score on a question. MongoDB, Cassandra, Redis, and Neo4j emerged as most popular databases in their respective families while NIS of all four of them is decreasing 2015 onwards. Additionally, we have also discussed how real-world events like publications, open-sourcing, mention in critical bills, version-release, acquiring ventures etc affect the interest corresponding to NoSQL databases over Stack Overflow. Results of this work will help database developers, database administrators for database selection, upgradation and maintenance.