Research Article Evaluating the Cassandra NoSQL Database Approach for

Copyright © 2015 Rodrigo Aniceto et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Rapid advances in high-throughput sequencing techniques have created interesting computational challenges in bioinformatics. One of them refers to management of massive amounts of data generated by automatic sequencers. We need to deal with the persistency of genomic data, particularly storing and analyzing these large-scale processed data. To find an alternative to the frequently considered relational databasemodel becomes a compelling task. Other datamodelsmay bemore effective when dealing with a very large amount of nonconventional data, especially for writing and retrieving operations. In this paper, we discuss the Cassandra NoSQL database approach for storing genomic data. We perform an analysis of persistency and I/O operations with real data, using the Cassandra database system. We also compare the results obtained with a classical relational database system and another NoSQL database approach, MongoDB. 1