Performance Optimizations of NoSQL Databases in Distributed Systems

Databases store information about a system and provide a mechanism for data to be accessed and manipulated. While advancements in the 1970s provided a relational database model that has persisted to this day, web-scale era mass data needs surfacing in the 1990s and the early 2000s revealed limitations in the scalability of the relational model. As systems grew and transitioned into distributed architectures to support mass data storage and parallel processing, a complete overhaul of distributed computing technologies evolved that fundamentally departed from the relational data model in favor of the NoSQL data model. The course of this research details the scaling problems encountered by relational databases and the NoSQL solutions that made web-scale systems possible