Selecting a Database Type

Key points when selecting databases

• Ease-of-learning curve

• Ease of data modeling

• Scalability/throughput

• Availability/partitioning tolerance

• Consistency

• Programming language support, product maturity, SQL support, and community

• Read/write priority (does the database prioritizes reads over writes, or the other way around)

Database types (with examples)

• Relational - PostgreSQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL

• Key-value - Riak KV, Amazon DynamoDB, Redis

• Document - MongoDB, Couchbase, Amazon DocumentDB

• Columnar - Cassandra, Scylla, Amazon SimpleDB

• Graph - Neo4j, Infinite Graph, Tiger Graph

• NewSQL - VoltDB, ClustrixDB, SimpleStore (aka MemSQL)

• Cloud-native - Snowflake, Datomic, Redshift

• Time-series - InfluxDB, kdb+, Amazon Timestream