Advantages and limitations of column family databases

NoSQL Concepts

Miriam Antona

Software engineer

Advantages - flexibility

• Rows within a column family can have different columns
• Add new columns to a row if we need them
• Avoids filling with default values
• Flexibility mustn't be considered as the only criterion
  • Evaluate key-value and document databases

Advantages - speed

• Related columns are stored together on disk
• Very fast writing / retrieving

Advantages - scalability

• Scale horizontally
  • Sharding across multiple servers

Advantages - large volumes of data

• Designed to handle large volumes of data
  • speed
  • horizontal scalability
  • efficient data compression

Limitations

• Atomic reads/writes but no multirow transactions
• No joins support
• No subqueries support
• Need to define the queries quite well
  • Queries change -> may need to change the column families
  • Can be costly

Let's practice!

NoSQL Concepts