Evaluating NewSQL Against Legacy Relational Databases and Schema-less Data Stores for Distributed Applications
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17010/ijcs/2025/v10/i2/175102Keywords:
Consistency
, database comparison, data model, distributed systems, financial services, healthcare databases, high ingestion workloads, NewSQL, NoSQL, real-time analytics, RDBMS, scalability, schematicless storage, transaction support.Paper Submission Date
, February 9, 2025, Paper sent back for Revision, February 16, Paper Acceptance Date, February 19, Paper Published Online, April 5, 2025.Abstract
The present research looks into the phenomenon of NewSQL databases as possible challengers to both RDBMS and NoSQL systems. It studies how NewSQL merges the flexibility and scalability of NoSQL with the strong consistency and transactional capabilities of RDBMS. A comparative analysis is conducted along primary lines such as data model, scalability, consistency, overall performance, transaction support, and real world penetration. The approach taken in this study is both theoretical and case-based, with insights from industry use cases as well as academic literature forming the backbone of the reasoning. The results show that NewSQL has considerably stronger advantages in environments that are distributed and require strong consistency like healthcare and financial services, as well as real-time analytics. However, it does not serve all purposes; mature, structured systems tend to have a traditional RDBMS backbone, while NoSQL is still preferred for schema-less, high-ingestion environments.Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
References
R. Elmasri and S. B. Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, 7th ed. Boston, MA, USA: Pearson, 2015.
A. Moniruzzaman and S. A. Hossain, “NoSQL database: New era of databases for big data analytics - classification, characteristics and comparison,†Int. J. Database Theory Application, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 1–14, Aug. 2013.
A. Pavlo and M. Aslett, â€What's Really New with NewSQL?†ACM SIGMOD Rec., vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 45–55, 2016.
J. Baker, C. Bond, J. C. Corbett, J. J. Furman, A. Khorlin, J. Larson, Jean-Michel Leon, Y. Li, A. Lloyd, and V. Yushprakh, “Megastore: Providing scalable, highly available storage for interactive services,†in Proc. 5th Biennial Conf. Innovative Data Sys. Res., 2011.
R. Katsaros, N. Koziris, and Y. Ioannidis, â€Distributed database systems: The case for NewSQL,†Lecture Notes Comput. Sci., vol. 12000, pp. 1–14, 2020.
A. Binani and N. Pareek, â€SQL vs. NoSQL vs. NewSQL: A comparative Study,†Comput. Appl. Eng., vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 7–11, 2016.
A. Shukla, “NewSQL Principles, Systems, and Current Trends,†Big Data Europe Workshop, 2019.
XenonStack Team, “SQL vs. NoSQL vs. NewSQL: The full comparison,†XenonStack, 2022.
Volt Active Data, â€NoSQL vs. NewSQL: What's the difference?†Volt Active Data Blog, Sep. 2016.
D. J. Abadi, “Consistency tradeoffs in modern distributed database system design: CAP is only part of the story,†IEEE Comput, vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 37–42, Feb. 2012.
J. C. Corbett et al., “Spanner: Google's globally distributed database,†in Proc. 10th USENIX Symp. Operating Syst. Des. Implementation, Hollywood, CA, USA, 2012, pp. 251–264.
P. Bailis, A. Fekete, M. J. Franklin, A. Ghodsi, J. M. Hellerstein, and I. Stoica, “Highly available transactions: Virtues and limitations,†in Proc.VLDB Endowment, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 181–192, 2013.
M. Stonebraker and A. Weisberg, â€The VoltDB Main Memory DBMS,†IEEE Data Eng. Bull., vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 21–27, June 2013.
S. S. Panda, B. K. Mohanta, U. Satapathy, D. Jena, and T. Patra, “Study of Blockchain based decentralized consensus algorithms,†in Proc. TENCON 2019 - IEEE Region 10 Conf., Kochi, India, Dec. 2019, doi: 10.1109/TENCON.2019.8929439.
R. Zec, Open Source Memory Database Architecture, 2018.
J. Patil, “Google Cloud Spanner,†Jayendra's Cloud Certification Blog. [Online]. Available: https://jayendrapatil.com/google-cloud-spanner/
P. Bailis, A. Ghodsi, J. M. Hellerstein, and I. Stoica, “Bolt-on consistency,†in Proc. ACM SIGMOD Int. Conf. Manage. Data, New York, NY, USA, 2013, pp. 761–772. [Online]. Available: http://www.bailis.org/papers/bolton-sigmod2013.pdf
J. Levandoski, D. Lomet, S. Sengupta, R. Stutsman, and R. Wang, “High performance transactions in Deuteronomy,†in 7th Biennial Conf. Innovative Data Systems Res, (CIDR ’15) Jan. 4-7, 2015, Asilomar, California, USA. [Online]. Available: https://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2015/Papers/CIDR15_Paper15.pdf
S. Chaudhuri, A. Ghosh, and A. Kumar, “NewSQL: Towards next- generation scalable RDBMS for online transaction processing (OLTP) for big data,†in Proc. Int. Conf. Comput. Communication Inform., Coimbatore, India, 2015, pp. 1–5.
S. Singh, â€SQL vs NoSQL vs NewSQL: Which database is best for you?†ReachSumit Blog, Jun. 2022.
C. S. J. He, S. Lee, and J. C. S. Lee, “A comparative study on NewSQL Databases,†arXiv preprint arXiv:1411.7343, Nov. 2014.
P. Valduriez and R. Jimenez-Peris, â€NewSQL Principles, Systems and Current Trends,†in Proc. IEEE BigData Conf., 2019.
S. Yu, “ACID properties in distributed databases,†Seminar Paper, University of Helsinki, 2009.
Y. Lu and J. Xu, â€A Middle Layer Solution to Support ACID Properties for NoSQL Databases,†J. King Saud Univ. – Comput. Inform. Sciences, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 270–280, 2015.
S. Ghosh and S. K. Ghosh, â€Data Management in Cloud Environments: NoSQL and NewSQL Data Stores,†J. Cloud Comput.: Advances, Syst. Appl., vol. 2, no. 22, 2013.
B. F. Cooper, “Yahoo! Cloud Serving Benchmark (YCSB),†GitHub Repository, 2010.
HammerDB Team, â€HammerDB: The Leading benchmark tool for databases,†2023.
benchANT Team, â€Database Ranking,†benchANT Report, 2023.
E. A. Brewer, â€Towards robust distributed systems,†in Proc. ACM PODC, 2000.
S. Gilbert and N. Lynch, â€Brewer's conjecture and the feasibility of consistent, available, partition-tolerant web services,†ACM SIGACT News, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 51–59, 2002.
G. DeCandia et al., “Dynamo: Amazon's highly available key-value store,†in Proc. SOSP, 2007.
MongoDB Inc., “Replica Set Architecture,†MongoDB Documentation, 2023.
J. Gray and A. Reuter, Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques, Morgan Kaufmann, 1993.
D. Ongaro and J. Ousterhout, “In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm (Raft),†in Proc. USENIX ATC, 2014.
Cockroach Labs, “The CockroachDB Architecture Guide,†2020.
GeeksforGeeks Team, “CAP Theorem in DBMS,†GeeksforGeeks.org. [Online]. Available: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/the-cap-theorem-in-dbms/
Google, “Spanner documentation,†Google Cloud. [Online]. Available: https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs