SQL versus noSQL (speed)

Solution 1:

People who tend to use noSQL use it specifically because it fits their use cases. Being divorced from normal RDBMS table relationships and constraints, as well as ACID-ity of data, it's very easy to make it run a lot faster.

Consider Twitter, which uses NoSQL because a user only does very limited things on site, or one exactly - tweet. And concurrency can be considered non-existent since (1) nobody else can modify your tweet and (2) you won't normally be simultaneously tweeting from multiple devices.

Solution 2:

The definition of noSQL systems is a very broad one -- a database that doesn't use SQL / is not a RDBMS. Therefore, the answer to your question is, in short: "it depends".

Some noSQL systems are basically just persistent key/value storages (like Project Voldemort). If your queries are of the type "look up the value for a given key", such a system will (or at least should be) faster that an RDBMS, because it only needs to have a much smaller feature set.

Another popular type of noSQL system is the document database (like CouchDB). These databases have no predefined data structure. Their speed advantage relies heavily on denormalization and creating a data layout that is tailored to the queries that you will run on it. For example, for a blog, you could save a blog post in a document together with its comments. This reduces the need for joins and lookups, making your queries faster, but it also could reduce your flexibility regarding queries.

Solution 3:

As Einstein would say, speed is relative.

If you need to store a master/detail simple application (like a shopping cart), you would need to do several Insert statements in your SQL application, also you will get a Data set of information when you do a query to get the purchase, if you're using NoSQL, and you're using it well, then you would have all the data for a single order in one simple "record" (document if you use the terms of NoSQL databases like djondb).

So, I really think that the performance of an application can be measured by the number of things it need to do to achieve a single requirement, if you need to do several Inserts to store an order and you only need one simple Insert in a database like djondb then the performance will be 10x faster in the NoSQL world, just because you're using 10 times less calls to the database layer, that's it.

To illustrate my point let me link an example I wrote sometime ago about the differences between NoSQL and SQL data models approach: https://web.archive.org/web/20160510045647/http://djondb.com/blog/nosql-masterdetail-sample/, I know it's a self reference, but basically I wrote it to address this question which I found it's the most challenging question a RDBMS guy could have and it's always a good way to explain why NoSQL is so different from SQL world, and why it will achieve better performance anytime, not because we use "nasa" technology, it's because NoSQL will let the developer do less... and get more, and less code = greater performance.

Solution 4:

The answer is: it depends. Generally speaking, the objective of NoSQL DATABASES (no "queries") is scalability. RDBMS usually have some hard limits at some point (I'm talking about millons and millons of rows) where you could not scale any more by traditional means (Replication, clustering, partitioning), and you need something more because your needs keep growing. Or even if you manage to scale, the overall setup is quite complicated. Or you can scale reads, but not writes.

And the queries depends on the particular implementation of your server, the type of query you are doing, the columns in the table, etc... remember that queries are just one part of the RDBMS.