A performance comparison of SQL and NoSQL databases

With the current emphasis on “Big Data”, NoSQL databases have surged in popularity. These databases are claimed to perform better than SQL databases. In this paper we aim to independently investigate the performance of some NoSQL and SQL databases in the light of key-value stores. We compare read, write, delete, and instantiate operations on key-value stores implemented by NoSQL and SQL databases. Besides, we also investigate an additional operation: iterating through all keys. An abstract key-value pair framework supporting these basic operations is designed and implemented using all the databases tested. Experimental results measure the timing of these operations and we summarize our findings of how the databases stack up against each other. Our results show that not all NoSQL databases perform better than SQL databases. Some are much worse. And for each database, the performance varies with each operation. Some are slow to instantiate, but fast to read, write, and delete. Others are fast to instantiate but slow on the other operations. And there is little correlation between performance and the data model each database uses.