Today’s business applications are able to take advantage of multiple devices such as smartphones, tablets and other IOT devices. However, with growing number of users and devices generating lots of unstructured data it is difficult to fit them all into fixed databases base schema and maintain them efficiently.
Improve customer focus
More and more business applications are capturing variety of customer data such as geolocation, online behavior, mobile device used to access the application and so on. Data captured from these variety of sources help business applications deliver personalized experience to their customers while helping the business identify up-selling or cross-selling opportunity.
As variety of data increases, traditional relational databases require to fragment the data that adds complexity in data management. With schema-less databases adding more attributes is possible on-the-fly while keeping the data management simple.
Consolidated multiple databases
Today’s many point-of-sale terminals, self service kiosks, mobile and web applications rely on catalogs. As enterprises offer more and more products and services, these catalogs has to be fragmented by business units or applications. Schema-less databases can remove the need of multiple databases and offer single distributed databases that can be shared between multiple applications.
Manage IoT generated data
Business applications collecting data from sensors, devices and IoTs is ever increasing. Such heterogeneous data requires new level of flexibility, agility and scalability. Schema-less databases are great at handing this. Traditional databases are good at managing uniformly structured data whereas schema-less databases work great for managing semi-structured and unstructured data generated by millions of devices. Non-relational nature of these databases opens up possibility of sharding and replicating data in multiple machines. This makes it possible to store massive volumes of data and query them on cluster leveraging parallel processing on multiple nodes.
Manage any type of content
Today’s web and mobile applications must be able to ingest wide variety of content from audio, video and photos. Especially, user generated content on social media sites such as comments. Schema-less databases are great at collecting and querying these variety of data.
Schemaless databases drastically reduces administration time while allowing application changes in real-time. This ability makes development faster without the need to worry about service interruption. Apart from that, schema less databases are way more inexpensive due to its scale-out capabilities as compared to deploying large relational database server from the beginning.
