AOSA: The NoSQL Ecosystem Review

(this is a review of the chapter on The NoSQL Ecosystem in the Architecture of Open Source Applications)

Unlike the other chapters in the book (and as stated in the introduction to the chapter), this portion of the book doesn’t dive deep into the internals of one particular project. Rather, it gives readers an overview of the various algorithms and concepts that serve as the building blocks for NoSQL systems like Voldemort, Cassandra, HBase, etc. I think it does a great job at explaining what is out there once one moves away from the traditional relational model and SQL world. It also references several seminal papers, like the Google BigTable and Amazon Dynamo papers, which I urge people to read if they are interested in understanding more about the topics covered in this chapter.

Speaking as someone who has read numerous papers on distributed and NoSQL systems (as well as studied them in several courses at UIUC) I feel like I didn’t gain a whole lot from reading this chapter. It was still a very enjoyable read and I really liked the sections that talked about fsync, read repair, hinted handoff, and anti-entropy. The section on the differences between range-based and hash-based partitioning was excellent as well. One thing I particularly liked was the author’s use of examples to explain concepts like the relational model, range-based partitioning, hash rings, etc.

If you have zero or very little background in NoSQL systems I would highly recommend reading this chapter.