Experimental Validation as Support in the Migration from SQL Databases to NoSQL Databases

NoSQL databases, also known Not only SQL databases, are a new type of databases that provides structures other than the tabular relations used in relational databases, for storage and retrieval data. This new databases are now a valuable asset to design complex real-time applications that use Big Data in cloud environments (NoSQL cloud databases). Today, the migration process from relational databases to NoSQL databases is unclear and mainly based on heuristic approaches such as the developers’ experience or intuitive judgments. This paper, which forms part of a more extensive research project regarding how the design and use of a guidelines set could improve the migration process. The results present an experiment designed to obtain a baseline that allows an effective comparison between two migration processes: the first one, without the use of any guidelines and based on the traditional heuristic approach and the second one, with the guidelines. The experiment reports that the use of such guidelines improves the migration process. KeywordsColumn oriented databases, NoSQL databases, distributed databases, software experimentation, cloud computing.