New Book Review: "Next Generation Databases"
New book review for Next Generation Databases: NoSQL, NewSQL, and Big Data, by Guy Harrison, Apress, 2015, reposted here:
Since it had been about 4 years since I read a database survey book entitled "Seven Databases in Seven Weeks: A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement" (2012), checking out this text seemed compelling as I watched db-engines.com database product rankings change over time as I moved from project to project, and I looked to determine appropriate uses of nonrelational database products, even as use of SQL has returned to find a place due to its many advantages. A relatively more recent database survey book entitled "In Search of Database Nirvana: The Challenges of Delivering Hybrid Transaction/Analytical Processing" (2016) that I read focused on HTAP (as the title suggests).
But chapter 12 of "Next Generation Databases" provides a brief look into what this later book covers in depth, so if you are interested in further exploration of the challenges for a query engine to support workloads spanning the spectrum that consists of OLTP on one end, to analytics on the other end, with operational and BI (business intelligence) workloads in the middle, or understanding how to assess a database engine, or combination of query and storage engines, geared toward meeting one's workload requirements, I suggest a follow-up reading of "In Search of Database Nirvana". If on the other hand you are looking to get some hands-on experience with a few of the covered databases, however, I suggest going straight to "Seven Databases in Seven Weeks", despite the fact that it is a few years old.
As a testament to the covered databases across "Seven Databases in Seven Weeks" and "Next Generation Databases", it is interesting that the database products covered in the earlier book (Redis, Neo4j, CouchDB, MongoDB, HBase, PostgreSQL, and Riak) highly overlap with those covered in "Next Generation Databases". While the appendix of "Next Generation Databases" lists 16 database products as being covered in the book, most of the content covers the same database products of the earlier book with the exception of PostgreSQL, which is replaced by Oracle RDBMS, and the addition of DynamoDB. Another important note to make on the subject of database product coverage is the fact that this book provides these products as examples of how different products are implemented and used, rather than attempts at thorough coverage.
After discussing the three database revolutions (pre-relational, relational, and next generation), the concepts behind Hadoop and DynamoDB are then discussed, followed by chapters on document, graph, columnar, and in-memory databases in the first half of the book, followed by what the author refers to as "the gory details" in the latter half of the book, which cover distributed database patterns, consistency models, data models and storage, languages and programming interfaces, and databases of the future. And this latter half repeatedly references MongoDB, HBase, and Cassandra to cover implementation details, although chapter 11 covers some additional products in light detail, and chapter 12 walks through some of the ways that Oracle RDBMS is evolving to be a convergent database that makes use of both relational and nonrelational models.