A cloud database is a database that typically runs on a cloud computing platform and access to the database is provided as-a-service. There are two common deployment models: users can run databases on the cloud independently, using a virtual machine image, or they can purchase access to a database service, maintained by a cloud database provider. Of the databases available on the cloud, some are SQL-based and some use a NoSQL data model.
Database services take care of scalability and high availability of the database. Database services make the underlying software-stack transparent to the user. [1]
There are two primary methods to run a database on a cloud platform:
The design and development of typical systems utilize data management and relational databases as their key building blocks. Advanced queries expressed in SQL work well with the strict relationships that are imposed on information by relational databases. However, relational database technology was not initially designed or developed for use over distributed systems. This issue has been addressed with the addition of clustering enhancements to the relational databases, although some basic tasks require complex and expensive protocols, such as with data synchronization. [5]
Modern relational databases have shown poor performance on data-intensive systems, therefore, the idea of NoSQL has been utilized within database management systems for cloud based systems. [6] Within NoSQL implemented storage, there are no requirements for fixed table schemas, and the use of join operations is avoided. "The NoSQL databases have proven to provide efficient horizontal scalability, good performance, and ease of assembly into cloud applications." [7] Data models relying on simplified relay algorithms have also been employed in data-intensive cloud mapping applications unique to virtual frameworks. [8]
It is also important to differentiate between cloud databases which are relational as opposed to non-relational or NoSQL: [9]
The following table lists notable database vendors with a cloud database offering, classified by their deployment model – machine image vs. database as a service – and data model, SQL vs. NoSQL.
Virtual Machine Deployment | Database as a Service | |
---|---|---|
SQL Data Model |
| |
NoSQL Data Model |
|
|
Db2 is a family of data management products, including database servers, developed by IBM. It initially supported the relational model, but was extended to support object–relational features and non-relational structures like JSON and XML. The brand name was originally styled as DB2 until 2017, when it changed to its present form.
In computing, a solution stack or software stack is a set of software subsystems or components needed to create a complete platform such that no additional software is needed to support applications. Applications are said to "run on" or "run on top of" the resulting platform.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon.com's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment of applications by providing a web service through which a user can boot an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to configure a virtual machine, which Amazon calls an "instance", containing any software desired. A user can create, launch, and terminate server-instances as needed, paying by the second for active servers – hence the term "elastic". EC2 provides users with control over the geographical location of instances that allows for latency optimization and high levels of redundancy. In November 2010, Amazon switched its own retail website platform to EC2 and AWS.
Navicat is a series of graphical database management and development software produced by CyberTech Ltd. for MySQL, MariaDB, Redis, MongoDB, Oracle, SQLite, PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server. It has an Explorer-like graphical user interface and supports multiple database connections for local and remote databases. Its design is made to meet the needs of a variety of audiences, from database administrators and programmers to various businesses/companies that serve clients and share information with partners.
Microsoft Azure SQL Database is a managed cloud database (PaaS) cloud-based Microsoft SQL Servers, provided as part of Microsoft Azure services. The service handles database management functions for cloud based Microsoft SQL Servers including upgrading, patching, backups, and monitoring without user involvement.
Google App Engine is a cloud computing platform used as a service for developing and hosting of web applications. Applications are sandboxed and run across multiple Google-managed servers. GAE supports automatic scaling for web applications, allocating more resources to the web application as the amount of requests increases. It was released as a preview in April 2008, and launched officially in September 2011.
The Rackspace Cloud is a set of cloud computing products and services billed on a utility computing basis from the US-based company Rackspace. Offerings include Cloud Storage, virtual private server, load balancers, databases, backup, and monitoring.
A database shard, or simply a shard, is a horizontal partition of data in a database or search engine. Each shard is held on a separate database server instance, to spread load.
NoSQL is an approach to database design that focuses on providing a mechanism for storage and retrieval of data that is modeled in means other than the tabular relations used in relational databases. Instead of the typical tabular structure of a relational database, NoSQL databases house data within one data structure. Since this non-relational database design does not require a schema, it offers rapid scalability to manage large and typically unstructured data sets. NoSQL systems are also sometimes called "Not only SQL" to emphasize that they may support SQL-like query languages or sit alongside SQL databases in polyglot-persistent architectures.
A graph database (GDB) is a database that uses graph structures for semantic queries with nodes, edges, and properties to represent and store data. A key concept of the system is the graph. The graph relates the data items in the store to a collection of nodes and edges, the edges representing the relationships between the nodes. The relationships allow data in the store to be linked together directly and, in many cases, retrieved with one operation. Graph databases hold the relationships between data as a priority. Querying relationships is fast because they are perpetually stored in the database. Relationships can be intuitively visualized using graph databases, making them useful for heavily inter-connected data.
Redis is a source-available, in-memory storage, used as a distributed, in-memory key–value database, cache and message broker, with optional durability. Because it holds all data in memory and because of its design, Redis offers low-latency reads and writes, making it particularly suitable for use cases that require a cache. Redis is the most popular NoSQL database, and one of the most popular databases overall. Redis is used in companies like Twitter, Airbnb, Tinder, Yahoo, Adobe, Hulu, Amazon and OpenAI.
Amazon Relational Database Service is a distributed relational database service by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is a web service running "in the cloud" designed to simplify the setup, operation, and scaling of a relational database for use in applications. Administration processes like patching the database software, backing up databases and enabling point-in-time recovery are managed automatically. Scaling storage and compute resources can be performed by a single API call to the AWS control plane on-demand. AWS does not offer an SSH connection to the underlying virtual machine as part of the managed service.
Xeround was a provider of cloud database software, launched in 2005, and was shut down in May 2013. The company was founded by Sharon Barkai and Gilad Zlotkin. Zlotkin, a former research fellow at MIT Sloan School of Management, founded five other startups including Radview (NASDAQ:RDVW). Israeli financial newspaper Globes ranked the company as one of Israel's most promising start-ups in 2006.
Apache Drill is an open-source software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications for interactive analysis of large-scale datasets. Built chiefly by contributions from developers from MapR, Drill is inspired by Google's Dremel system. Drill is an Apache top-level project. Tom Shiran is the founder of the Apache Drill Project. It was designated an Apache Software Foundation top-level project in December 2016.
mLab was a cloud database service which hosted fully-managed MongoDB databases. mLab ran on cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, as well as various platform-as-a-service providers.
Amazon Aurora is a proprietary relational database offered as a service by Amazon Web Services (AWS) since October 2014. Aurora is available as part of the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).
Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model database service offered by Microsoft. It is designed to provide high availability, scalability, and low-latency access to data for modern applications. Unlike traditional relational databases, Cosmos DB is a NoSQL and vector database, which means it can handle unstructured, semi-structured, structured, and vector data types.
This is a timeline of Amazon Web Services, which offers a suite of cloud computing services that make up an on-demand computing platform.
Serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider allocates machine resources on demand, taking care of the servers on behalf of their customers. "Serverless" is a misnomer in the sense that servers are still used by cloud service providers to execute code for developers. However, developers of serverless applications are not concerned with capacity planning, configuration, management, maintenance, fault tolerance, or scaling of containers, virtual machines, or physical servers. When an app is not in use, there are no computing resources allocated to the app. Pricing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application. It can be a form of utility computing.
Amazon DocumentDB is a managed proprietary NoSQL database service that supports document data structures, with some compatibility with MongoDB version 3.6 and version 4.0. As a document database, Amazon DocumentDB can store, query, and index JSON data. It is available on Amazon Web Services. As of March 2023, AWS introduced some compliance with MongoDB 5.0 but lacks time series collection support.
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