Issues in Handling Complex Data Structures with NoSQL Databases

The emerging storage systems for Cloud Computing are so-called NoSQL databases. These systems lack the join mechanism and declarative queries approach but show high scalability and performance. While most famous ICT companies have no doubts about the usage of NoSQL, there is still a lack of methodologies and mechanisms to support the design and management of a NoSQL database starting from a complex high level data schema. The final goal of our work is to equip NoSQL databases with programming abstractions that make them close to the expressiveness of RDBMS, still maintaining their significant advantages in terms of scalability. In this paper we discuss the main shortcomings of using a NoSQL approach and we show how we plan to overcome them.