SQL and No-SQL Databases, What’s The Difference?

Photo by Rodion Kutsaev on Unsplash

As a web developer, especially back-end web development, you cannot avoid Databases, it’s quite literally unavoidable, if you’re just understanding the world of databases and you’re confused of what exactly SQL and No-SQL databases are, then this article is for you, let’s dive right in ladies and gentlemen, and non-binary.

SQL

So, let’s begin with SQL, well SQL is a standard language, for accessing and manipulating databases, SQL stands for Standard Query Language, SQL became a standard of the American National Standard Institute(ANSI) and of the International Organization for Standardization(ISO) around 1986 & 87

So, What Exactly Can SQL Do?

Well pretty basic database stuff, nothing too complex

1. execute queries from a database
2. retrieve data from a database
3. Insert, update, delete, create records
4. create databases
5. create new tables in a database
6. pretty much manipulate every single thing in a database, with SQL you can bend a DB to your will

RDBMS

RDBMS stands for Relational Database Management System, SQL works with modern Database management systems like MySQL Oracle, and the likes. RDBMS uses SQL syntax to store and retrieve data.

No-SQL

NoSQL simply stands for Non-SQL or simply no SQL, point is NoSQL databases are database that stores data in a format other than relational tables.

However NoSQL databases does store relationship data, just because it’s a non-relational database doesn’t mean it can’t store relationship data, they just store it differently than your standard RDBMS.

It doesn’t require a fixed schema, avoid joins, and it’s easy to scale. NoSQL is used for big-time data and real time web-apps, for ex, Google, Facebook and Apple collect huge amount every second, so using NoSQL databases is the first choice for companies like these. NoSQL doesn’t use any kind of declarative language, and databases can be document based, key-value pairs, graph databases.

Alright, I Know What They Are Now, So which Do I Use?

My personal answer, why not both then? it’s perfectly fine to use both SQL and NoSQL databases, as the two of them have quite different purposes.

When To Use SQL

1. SQL is the easiest language used to communicate with relational databases
2. Building Static Apps
3. When ever you require to store and retrieve data quickly
4. When you want to work on complex queries and advance manipulation of data

When To Use NoSQL

1. When building and dealing real-time apps
2. When your data needs flexible schema.
3. Storing temporary data, like wish list and session data
4. When Relational Database Systems Aren’t enough.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, SQL, NoSQL Databases are just tools, you can decide to use them when ever you like whenever it best suits the application you are developing. I hope you had a fun read, follow me on twitter, and I’ll see you in the next one! cheers!