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A review by mckenzierichardson
Nosql Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Emerging World of Polyglot Persistence by Pramod Sadalage, Martin Fowler
5.0
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I bought this book for a Database Management Systems course and found it very helpful as a brief overview of NoSQL databases.
The book is broken into two parts: Understand and Implement. In the first, the authors give a survey of some basic information regarding things like aggregate data models, distribution models, consistency, map-reduce, and roughly what NoSQL is.
In the second part, more details are given about the types of NoSQL databases including key-value, document, column-family stores, and graph databases. Each chapter runs through the features of the database type as well as suitable use cases and when not to use each type. There is also a comparison chart mapping the terms between traditional RDBMS and a representative database for each type. There are also chapters touching on schema migrations, polyglot persistence, and how to choose a database.
The chapters are relatively short, making them less intimidating. It is a book written for beginners and on the whole I found it easy to understand. Throughout the book there are helpful visualizations and simple examples.
Because of the simplicity of the book, I would not recommend it to those already familiar with NoSQL. It is very clearly meant for beginners and because of this does not include in-depth examples. It is meant as a survey of NoSQL and I found it very adequate for that goal. Good for those interesting in learning more about NoSQL and as a beginner guide for those considering implementing NoSQL. It is a good place to start if you are thinking of using a NoSQL database to point you in the right direction.
I bought this book for a Database Management Systems course and found it very helpful as a brief overview of NoSQL databases.
The book is broken into two parts: Understand and Implement. In the first, the authors give a survey of some basic information regarding things like aggregate data models, distribution models, consistency, map-reduce, and roughly what NoSQL is.
In the second part, more details are given about the types of NoSQL databases including key-value, document, column-family stores, and graph databases. Each chapter runs through the features of the database type as well as suitable use cases and when not to use each type. There is also a comparison chart mapping the terms between traditional RDBMS and a representative database for each type. There are also chapters touching on schema migrations, polyglot persistence, and how to choose a database.
The chapters are relatively short, making them less intimidating. It is a book written for beginners and on the whole I found it easy to understand. Throughout the book there are helpful visualizations and simple examples.
Because of the simplicity of the book, I would not recommend it to those already familiar with NoSQL. It is very clearly meant for beginners and because of this does not include in-depth examples. It is meant as a survey of NoSQL and I found it very adequate for that goal. Good for those interesting in learning more about NoSQL and as a beginner guide for those considering implementing NoSQL. It is a good place to start if you are thinking of using a NoSQL database to point you in the right direction.