Recognize the Need for Document Databases

Document databases have been gaining in popularity for a number of years now and they are widely available - as tools which can be downloaded and installed on your own servers, or as services on the big cloud platforms. This course, Recognize the Need for Document Databases, introduces you to what document databases are, how they compare to the traditional relational databases, and some of the complexities involved when storing data on such systems. First, you will explore what big data is, and how many of the requirements for big data analysis make document databases well-suited to manage their storage and analysis needs. While doing so, you will see some of the trade-offs involved in distributed systems when covering the CAP theorem. Next, you will dive into the fundamentals of document databases - how data is represented in the form of key and value pairs, and the data formats which are used in such systems. You will also touch upon the benefits and drawbacks of representing data in the form of documents. Finally, you will discover the modeling of data in document databases. Topics such as normalization and denormalization of data are covered, as are the modeling of relationships between different types of entities. Once you complete this course, you will have a clear understanding of the characteristics of document databases - what their strengths are, and where such systems have limitations. You will be in a position to make informed decisions on when to use document databases, and how to model data on such platforms.