SQL or NoSQL that’s the question

With the emerge of new NoSQL databases, it’s very important to understand their abilities and the use-cases for a scalable web application. Understanding what they provide and what sort of problems they can solve is vital to successful usage of NoSQL databases in the web architectures and infra structures.

The key is that Relational Databases are not dead and they won’t be. They have specific abilities which would facilitate implementing a lot of ideas in the data modelling.

By experience, we realized that using a Hybrid system is the best solution. While you benefit from bests of the both worlds, you can improve the quality of product and availability of service to the customers.

In this presentation, an example from game-industry would be provided. A UbiSoft, Montreal game which was fully based on Relational databases, has been restructured to a Hybrid system to benefit from both Relational database (MySQL) and a NoSQL database (MongoDB).

The major design decisions, and the benefits of each would be discussed in details to give audience a perspective of what could be achieved within a Hybrid system.

The process of migrating the previous architecture to the new one in a live system, without having any downtime would be explained as well, to show how approachable and easy is this new Hybrid design.

The new architecture has been beneficial for the community of players and also for the development team, which they will be explained.

The Hybrid system has been on Production since October.2012 with no downtime since.