Choosing Between SQL and NoSQL Is Now Easier Than Ever

TL;DR: Unless ACID compliance is a critical concern (you’re in finance, e-commerce, or government), choose NoSQL.

Oren Yakobi
ITNEXT

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ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) guarantees validity even during errors, power failures, etc.

First, let us swallow the frog. Why is NoSQL inferior in terms of ACID?

NoSQL databases sacrifice ACID compliance for flexibility and processing speed. You can implement custom efforts for the sake of ACID, but it is up to you.

Second, NoSQL is a general classification for many databases (like Key-value stores, Document stores, and Graphs). I will mainly refer to the document store in this article, which is most commonly used and relevant to this comparison.

Nowadays, when NoSQL implementations like MongoDB feature join queries, random selects, transactions, and other features that not so long ago were SQL’s definite advantages, it makes you question the necessity of using it.

NoSQL also preserved its benefits as being higher performant, flexible (schema-less), easier to scale, greener on the disk size (and thus cheaper), and maybe simpler.

Our decision should be much more comfortable, sometimes a no-brainer.

One caveat

Like in every loose technology, you must be the excellent developer you are and design and use it well, or it will turn back at you.

But

As differences become obscured, while performance, flexibility, and scale may not be a significant concern, other reasons may break the tie. For example — an excellent ORM like Node.js’s Sequelize.

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Interested in delving deeper into this topic or need personalized guidance? Reach out to me at orenykb@gmail.com for dedicated consultancy tailored to your specific needs. I’m here to support you on your journey.

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