Chapter 2 - Migration of healthcare relational database to NoSQL cloud database for healthcare analytics and management

Abstract

Due to the exponential increase in the volume of data in the healthcare sector generated from various sources such as ECGs, X-rays, CT scans, ultrasound reports, lab reports, radiology tests, and clinical research in the form of Electronic Health Records and Electronic Medical Records, relational databases cannot reasonably meet the requirements, such as Web service availability and scaling. Handling more users and data means the addition of big servers, and big servers are tremendously complex and extremely expensive. So, as organizations are facing performance problems with relational databases they are currently using for existing or new applications, especially when the number of users increases, they realize the necessity for a database tier that is faster and more flexible. This is the correct time to migrate from relational database systems to a cloud-based architecture for a NoSQL (NOT ONLY SQL) cloud database. The NoSQL cloud database is being adopted in order to scale out more applications and to support more users. NoSQL cloud databases allow an increase in performance and availability of services, so it seems to be favorable to put forward timely information on data migration from Structured Query Language (SQL) databases to NoSQL cloud databases. First, we present the challenges and analysis of data migration and also present data migration techniques from the relational database management system (RDBMS) to NoSQL using NoSQL technology. Second, we discuss the technology background, applications, and challenges related to NoSQL cloud-based technology. Then we present cloud-based architectures for databases, with technology, applications, and challenges of cloud databases and show how data migration techniques are used to migrate a relational database to a NoSQL cloud database.