Fast and Scalable Cloud Data Management

Book excerpt: The unprecedented scale at which data is both produced and consumed today has generated a large demand for scalable data management solutions facilitating fast access from all over the world. As one consequence, a plethora of non-relational, distributed NoSQL database systems have risen in recent years and today’s data management system landscape has thus become somewhat hard to overlook. As another consequence, complex polyglot designs and elaborate schemes for data distribution and delivery have become the norm for building applications that connect users and organizations across the globe – but choosing the right combination of systems for a given use case has become increasingly difficult as well. To help practitioners stay on top of that challenge, this book presents a comprehensive overview and classification of the current system landscape in cloud data management as well as a survey of the state-of-the-art approaches for efficient data distribution and delivery to end-user devices. The topics covered thus range from NoSQL storage systems and polyglot architectures (backend) over distributed transactions and Web caching (network) to data access and rendering performance in the client (end-user). By distinguishing popular data management systems by data model, consistency guarantees, and other dimensions of interest, this book provides an abstract framework for reasoning about the overall design space and the individual positions claimed by each of the systems therein. Building on this classification, this book further presents an application-driven decision guidance tool that breaks the process of choosing a set of viable system candidates for a given application scenario down into a straightforward decision tree.