Technology plays a central role in all businesses and is rapidly reshaping the future of industry. As Sumit Yadav explained in ‘The Role of Technology in Modern Business’, “from small startups to large corporations, technological innovations are revolutionizing the way companies operate, compete, and ultimately thrive.”

One of the most important innovations is how enterprises use data to grow their business and customer base. A PR Newswire post on the ‘NoSQL Market’ detailed how this demand for data has led to an enterprise-wide need for scalable and flexible database solutions through the use of NoSQLs. The term NoSQL was first coined by Carlo Strozzi in 1998 and became popular and widely used in 2009 when the developer Johan Oskarsson used the term to describe “open-source distributed, non-relational databases”. Today, the world’s biggest enterprises have invested in NoSQLs, which has led to the NoSQL industry generating $7.3 billion in 2022 with a predicted market cap of $86.3 billion in 2032. For many enterprises, utilizing a NoSQL has become a vital part of their business structure.

What is a NoSQL?

NoSQL stands for ‘non-SQL’ or ‘not only SQL.’ An SQL database is a domain-specific programming language usually used for inserting, updating, querying, and deleting data within a database. Structured data is stored in a predefined format and frequently comprises alphanumeric characters. As outlined in a post on ‘What is NoSQL?’ by MongoDB, NoSQL databases, in comparison, come in a variety of types based on their data model, and the main types are document, key-value, wide-column, and graph. This makes it a model suitable for both semi-structured and unstructured data, which is why many enterprises use it for “real-time analytics, content management, IoT applications, recommendation systems, fraud detection, product catalog management, and much more.”

Benefits of a NoSQL For Enterprises

Able to Handle Large Volumes of Data

The growth of online real-time data has led many of the world’s biggest enterprises to use NoSQL databases to handle and easily organize the large amount of data they collect. Statistics show that the world creates 402.74 million terabytes of data every day, and the vast majority of this data is unstructured. This has presented a big challenge for giant enterprises with huge customer bases. An article on the ‘System Design of Netflix’ explains how the platform uses NoSQL for their user base of over 200 million subscribers. The distributed architecture of a NoSQL makes “it an excellent choice for maintaining users’ viewing history” as well as customer profiles and content recommendations. Similarly, Uber uses a NoSQL to handle the vast amount of data on driver/rider profiles, real-time location data, and trip histories. Using a NoSQL, both enterprises can store high volumes of data and provide fast and easy access.

Scalability Advantage

Due to the ability to handle large amounts of data across multiple servers, a NoSQL can allow an enterprise to easily scale. The Forbes piece ‘How to Harness MongoDB for Scalable and Flexible Business Solutions’ describes how the American business magazine used the NoSQL platform “to help re-engineer their content management system as their platform expanded, enabling faster content updates and improved engagement rates.” A key feature of a NoSQL that allows enterprises like Forbes to scale efficiently is the flexibility in facilitating different modes of data and structures “without the need for a predefined schema.”

Integration with IoT

The Internet of Things is a key component of how many global enterprises operate. As we explain in ‘The Integration of IoT in Fleet Management’, companies such as fleet operators have embraced IoT to streamline operations, enhance safety, and reduce overhead costs. For enterprises that use IoT, a NoSQL database allows them to easily combine operational and analytical databases instead of dividing the data between two separate databases. Therefore, companies with many connected IoT devices can more easily manage and analyze the collected data and provide real-time feedback.

Developer and Customer Friendly

NoSQLs are developer-friendly, allowing users to collect data in a preferred format. For instance, NoSQL databases allow the data to be stored in native formats, so developers don’t need to adapt the data, reducing the number of transformations required when moving data in and out of databases. For the customer, enterprises that use NoSQL databases with customer-facing applications can provide more personalized user experiences. This is because NoSQLs can store vast amounts of customer data in a single database across multiple applications. The most famous example is Amazon, which uses a NoSQL to keep track of a customer’s buying habits and cart content to provide a personalized service by pointing them toward similar objects of interest. Enterprises of all sizes can use these databases to improve their customer service.

As the future of business relies more heavily on data to improve all aspects of a company, more enterprises are utilizing NoSQLs.