I've recently learnt about "NewSQL" databases like:
- Google Cloud Spanner (proprietary)
- Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB (proprietary)
- CockroachDB (open source)
- VoltDB (open source)
I was reading about them and learnt that they provide best of both worlds, that is NoSQL and SQL and are ACID compliant.
CockroachDB for instance provides some compatibility with PostgreSQL and I can use PostgreSQL clients to use it just like that.
I was struggling a lot recently what should I choose for my next project and I would like to build it with scalability in mind(which is definitely harder when using MySQL etc.), and because I like what NoSQL and SQL databases provide, does it mean NewSQL databases are silver bullets?
Best Answer
Azure and AWS provide an excellent SQL database service. The biggest difference I know of is that AZURE does not provide the SQL Agent, but it has the same capability through a different approach. SQL agent lets you run jobs (groups of stored procedures or SQL code) unattended at just about any interval, like end of month billing. Many companies are moving to these hosted databases because you don't need a DBA sitting around doing the backups and clustering, or setting up servers. If you are just starting out, you can use a hosted SQL service from Godaddy quite cheaply, either MS SQL or MySQL. When you say scalability, are you talking 100 million records or 100,000? MySQL can scale quite well but does not have the features (especially in performance debugging) that is built into MS SQL. If its in your budget, Azure or AWS would be the way to go. I have no experience (yet) with Google cloud, but I am pretty sure its as good as the other two.