Moving from Relational Data Storage to Decentralized Structured Storage System

The utmost requirement of any successful application in today’s environment is to extract the desired piece of information from its Big Data with a very high speed. When Big Data is managed via traditional approach of relational model, accessing speed is compromised. Moreover, relational data model is not flexible enough to handle big data use cases that contains a mixture of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Thus, there is a requirement for organizing data beyond relational model in a manner which facilitates high availability of any type of data instantly. Current research is a step towards moving relational data storage (PostgreSQL) to decentralized structured storage system (Cassandra), for achieving high availability demand of users for any type of data (structured and unstructured) with zero fault tolerance. For reducing the migration cost, the research focuses on reducing the storage requirement by efficiently compressing the source database before moving it to Cassandra.

Experiment has been conducted to explore the effectiveness of migration from PostgreSQL database to Cassandra. A sample data set varying from 5,000 to 50,000 records has been considered for comparing time taken during selection, insertion, deletion, and searching of records in relational database and Cassandra. The current study found that Cassandra proves to be a better choice for select, insert, and delete operations. The queries involving the join operation in relational database are time consuming and costly. Cassandra proves to be search efficient in such cases, as it stores the nodes together in alphabetical order, and uses split function.