Oracle NoSQL Database (ONDB) is a non-relational database with a shared-nothing architecture designed for scalability and throughput. An ONDB uses KVStore—a collection of storage nodes across which data is distributed. This shared-nothing architecture supports petabytes of data and can service a massive number of network requests. Each storage node can service requests; therefore, the parallelization enables greater scalability and throughput. Cases for NoSQL include:

• Document databases—This type of database is designed to store and retrieve JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)-like documents. The benefit of retrieving JSON documents is that they are in the same format as the application code. This benefit makes document databases a strong choice for blogs, content catalogs, and social platforms.
• Key-value databases—In this type of database, a key can be used to look up a value. The value can range from a simple string to a large complex object. For example, a key-value database can be used to store the information from a user’s web session. The key enables saving the unstructured data (value) from the session in a document.

In this use case, the REGION and NATION tables from the decision support benchmark were loaded into the NoSQL database. We joined data from these two tables with tables in Hadoop and Microsoft SQL Server using Oracle Big Data SQL to validate data virtualization.

We placed the ONDB database on one PowerFlex HCI node with the processor of the PowerFlex node shared between the storage service and the NoSQL database. The four Intel processors on each PowerFlex node have sufficient processing power for the NoSQL database for a test of this size.

The storage performance for the NoSQL database benefits from reads and writes balanced across all the PowerFlex HCI nodes. This approach of distributing reads and writes across all nodes in the PowerFlex storage platform assists with eliminating hot spots, provides greater consistency in performance, and optimizes efficiency.