Work through the following materials this week:

1. Read Pramod Sadalage’s NoSQL Databases: An Overview (circa 2012) and explain:

   1. the key motivations for considering non-relational database systems.

   2. aggregate data models.

   3. polyglot persistence.

   4. the relevance of the CAP theorem.

   5. the types of NoSQL databases.

   6. when (and when not) to use NoSQL database systems.

   An alternate source of this basic information is Martin Fowler’s Introduction to NoSQL video.

2. Use “Getting Started with the Key/Value API”, Chapters 3–5, from the Oracle NoSQL Database documentation as a reference. Be sure to know how to:

   1. Compare and contrast Major and minor key components.

   2. Use the appropriate commands to write and retrieve records.

   Be sure that you can compare and contrast relational data representations with key-value representations. Note that we will not use these higher-level features: the NoSQL Table API (We’ll focus on the lower-level key/value API); the Avro value schema mechanism (We’ll restrict ourselves to simple string values, specifically byte arrays).

3. This practical article by Re Lai, Enterprise Application Development Using Oracle NoSQL Database, is also helpful. It includes some material that we don't care about (i.e., NetBeans, UML, Avro value-handling) but the following sections are useful for the homework. Skim them now and be prepared to reference them later as needed.

   1. “Represent Key-Value Pairs” — Designing keys
   2. “CRUD” — Implementing the standard persistent data operations
   3. “Composite Keys” — Designing multi-element keys
   4. “Model Entities” — Modeling relational records in a KV store
   5. “Model Secondary Indexes” — Storing and retrieving sorted data
   6. “Model Multi-values and Relationships” — Modeling foreign key relationships