What are the canonical NoSQL resources for people who never used this technology?

Question

I am getting more and more interested by the NoSQL technology and I can read several posts on SE about how it works and the different products available.

However, I wonder if there are some canonical references, books or articles, which we can site in a research paper for example and which we can read to have a good overview of:

• What the benefits/disadvantages are?
• How it works?

Answer 1

1. For a collection of non-relational databases, I'd say the best reference is Stefan Edlich's nosql-databases.org

2. Here is a pretty comprehensive list of books, guides, and papers on NoSQL databases.

3. For staying informed and learning more about the NoSQL space there's the myNoSQL blog nosql.mypopescu.com (nb: I'm the creator and writer of this 2 and 1/2 years old NoSQL focused blog :-)

4. For OODBMS related topics there's Roberto Zicari's www.odbms.org

Answer 2

This is a tough question in the sense that there are several NoSQL databases out there, and they're all slightly (sometimes radically) different from each other.

An important concept to understand for NoSQL technology is that of Brewer's CAP Theorem, so I've provided a link to a good article on it. For a brief, graphical overview on the CAP Theorem, you should also look at Nathan Hurst's blog, a Visual Guide to NoSQL Systems.

Personally, I have experience with MongoDB (school) and Cassandra (work). Although, I haven't had to really do enough with Cassandra to recommend any good resources on it. As for MongoDB, I have read several books on the subject and here are two (that I think) are really good:

• MongoDB In Action by Kyle Banker
• MongoDB: The Definitive Guide by Kristina Chadrow

Kyle Banker also wrote a good article called "MongoDB and Ecommerce", just to give some possible use cases for it.

Answer 3

Here is a link that I found useful when starting out: http://kkovacs.eu/cassandra-vs-mongodb-vs-couchdb-vs-redis

I would also just search around on slideshare.net, there is some really good and useful stuff up there. After that, watch some vids of presentations from O'Reilly conferences and stuff like that. Absolutely I have found just pinging people on LinkedIn and getting their opinions was the most helpful.

I am at DataStax so I obviously prefer Cassandra but to each his own. If you want more info, feel free to reach out.