When Relational-Based Applications Go to NoSQL Databases: A Survey

Several data-centric applications today produce and manipulate a large volume of data, the so-called Big Data. Traditional databases, in particular, relational databases, are not suitable for Big Data management. As a consequence, some approaches that allow the definition and manipulation of large relational data sets stored in NoSQL databases through an SQL interface have been proposed, focusing on scalability and availability. This paper presents a comparative analysis of these approaches based on an architectural classification that organizes them according to their system architectures. Our motivation is that wrapping is a relevant strategy for relational-based applications that intend to move relational data to NoSQL databases (usually maintained in the cloud). We also claim that this research area has some open issues, given that most approaches deal with only a subset of SQL operations or give support to specific target NoSQL databases. Our intention with this survey is, therefore, to contribute to the state-of-art in this research area and also provide a basis for choosing or even designing a relational-to-NoSQL data wrapping solution.