A workload-driven method for designing aggregate-oriented NoSQL databases

Abstract

Due to the scalability and availability problems with traditional relational database systems, a variety of NoSQL stores have emerged over the last decade to deal with big data. How data are structured in a NoSQL store has a large impact on the query and update performance and the storage usage. Thus, different from the traditional database design, not only the data structure but also the data access patterns need to be considered in the design of NoSQL database schemas. In this paper, we present a general workload-driven method for designing key-value, wide-column, and document NoSQL database schemas. We first present a generic logical model Query Path Graph (QPG) that can represent the data structures of the UML class diagram. We also define mappings from the SQL-based query patterns to QPG and from QPG to aggregate-oriented NoSQL schemas. We use a cost model to measure the query and update performance and optimize the QPG schemas. We evaluate the proposed method with several typical case studies by simulating workloads on databases with different schema designs. The results demonstrate that our method preserves the generality and the quality of the design.