SQL Server vs. NoSQL

Question

So I have a website that could eventually get some pretty high traffic. My DB implementation is in SQL Server 2008 at the moment. I really only have 2 tables and a few stored pr

Answer 1

With a simple table structure and data that fits on one server, it doesn't matter much what platform you use. There are a several possible reasons to need to move to NoSQL:

• Data scaling - SQL works best when all the data fits on one server (up to a few TB). The reason a lot of NoSQL stores don't have join is that they were designed not to require all the objects to be on one server.

• Performance scaling - NoSQL stores do tend to be faster at handling high traffic, but not necessarily by enough to matter. You can improve SQL performance quite a lot with replication and caching as long as you aren't running into data size issues. Writes generally do have to run on the one server, but in most cases you will need to improve read performance long before write performance becomes an issue.

• Complex data access - some types of queries simply don't fit well into a relational model. Graph and set stores work quite differently from relational databases so are a better fit for some applications.

• Easier development - If you don't already have a SQL database and all the code to support it, using a schemaless datastore can save quite a bit of development time.