In my last blog post I provided a general introduction to key value stores (KVS). In this post I’m going to explain how InfoFrame Elastic Relational Store (IERS) takes the basic concepts of the KVS and improves upon them to build a database with strong business oriented features.
The main improvement is that IERS is built to process high-speed transactions with full ACID capabilities. As a quick refresher, ACID stands for Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability and refers to the set of properties that deliver reliable processing of database transactions. Atomicity preserves transaction integrity by only allowing complete transactions to be committed, not just parts of transactions. Consistency allows for well-defined rules to control and validate the data before it is written to the database. Isolation verifies that concurrent execution of transactions still results in complete transactions being committed; this is where conflict resolution takes places. Durability means that once a transaction has been committed it will remain intact even in the event of power loss, crashes, or other system errors. IERS offers full ACID support and thus meets the requirements for a business environment processing transactions, which many KVS fail to meet.
Most KVS cannot guarantee the constraints that developers need to place on data in order to preserve consistency. Consistency needs to be handled by the application, which pushes this critical function further away from the database engine and makes it more cumbersome to design the application as the application must now include features the database should handle. On the other hand, IERS provides consistency at the database layer, preserving the high performance of KVS.
Whereas most KVS require database-specific code to be written, IERS uses an industry standard SQL interface. Most KVS platforms don’t support SQL, hence the name NoSQL being used as a term to describe them. Over time, NoSQL as a term has expanded to include next-generation databases with a SQL interface by rebranding itself as “Not Only SQL.” Some industry analysts refer to next-generation databases with a SQL interface as NewSQL. However, the most commonly used database programming language is SQL and many business environments already have a significant investment in SQL. For these reasons, SQL support is one of the most important and most used features of IERS. Using another KVS might require developers to learn a custom API, thus delaying the development process. IERS, with its SQL support, allows developers to get up and running as fast as possible.
Database security is also a requirement in a business environment. IERS provides the same user authentication and table level access management as an RDBMS. In contrast, the typical KVS will push this up to the application layer. IERS also offers full support for user activity logging and can be integrated with a solution like IBM Guardium to provide complete audit trails.
IERS also fully supports range queries, a common database operation that retrieves all records where some value is between an upper and lower boundary. For example, list all customers between ages 8 and 18. A typical KVS cannot support a range query. In fact, a typical KVS only supports queries on the key.
As you can see, IERS contains many enhancements that are typically not found in a KVS. When the database layer lacks such functionality, then it must be implemented in the application layer. This requires the application layer to manage transactions, security, data constraints and consistency. It’s much easier to simply use a database that contains this functionality such as IERS. By including the functionality described in this posting, IERS demonstrates that it is more applicable for use in solving business problems than a typical key value store. The most important of these enhancements is full support for ACID transactions; without ACID there cannot be transactions. Businesses evaluating NoSQL and NewSQL key value stores for a high-speed transaction driven environment will find that IERS more than meets their needs.
To learn more about NEC’s IERS solution visit: http://goo.gl/TnFkbR
*Matt Sarrel is a leading tech analyst and writer providing guest content for NEC.
