Role of Schemaless Databases in Today's Business Applications

Overview

Today’s business applications leverage multiple devices such as smartphones, tablets, and wearables to capture rich customer data. Schemaless databases provide the flexibility needed to handle this diverse data landscape.

Improve Customer Focus

Modern business applications capture a variety of customer data including geolocation, online behavior, preferences, and transaction history. This data supports customer engagement strategies like up-selling and cross-selling.

Traditional relational databases fragment this data across multiple tables, creating complexity and performance challenges. Schemaless databases allow storing all related customer information in a single, flexible structure.

Relational databases fragment rich customer profiles across dozens of tables. By the time you’ve joined them all together, the performance cost has already undermined the insight.

Consolidated Multiple Databases

Today’s enterprises run many terminals, self-service kiosks, mobile applications, and web applications that rely on shared catalogs and point-of-sale systems. A schemaless approach enables consolidating data from multiple disparate systems into a unified data store.

Manage IoT Generated Data

Business applications increasingly collect data from sensors, devices, and IoT systems. This heterogeneous data has varying structures and formats. Schemaless databases provide:

• Scalability for high-volume sensor data
• Non-relational flexibility enabling sharding and replication
• Ability to handle unstructured and semi-structured data

Manage Any Type of Content

Modern web and mobile applications must ingest wide varieties of content including audio, video, images, and text. Schemaless databases support:

• Storage of diverse content types
• Flexible schema evolution
• Reduced administration overhead
• Rapid application changes

Schemaless databases drastically reduce administration time while allowing application changes in real-time without costly schema migrations.

Schema migrations are one of the most expensive forms of application change. Schemaless databases remove that bottleneck entirely, letting your data model evolve as fast as your product does.

Conclusion

Schemaless databases address the requirements of modern business applications by providing flexibility, scalability, and agility needed to handle diverse data types and evolving requirements.