5 Facts About Raven NoSQL Database

A car stopped short in the middle of the highway. Out of nowhere, a raven swooped down, dropped something, then flew away. The car moved on. A few seconds later, the raven quickly dove back down, grabbed something in its beak, and flew off.

He repeated this act all morning.

Highway cameras later revealed the raven was placing walnuts on the road so the cars would drive over them to crack the shells. Once the Chrysler did its business, the raven would grab the nut inside and have breakfast.

The raven is one of the most highly adaptable animals in the world.

Just like RavenDB.

The first document database to offer ACID guarantees, RavenDB was developed alongside the early release of the major cloud platforms. It is a distributed database that adapts quickly to the latest technologies to enable you to maintain fast performance, minimal overhead, and scale out on demand.

Here are five examples of how a database can evolve with cutting-edge innovations to consistently keep you ahead of the curve.

Auto Indexing

Why should you spend too much time making indexes when your database can do it for you? RavenDB automatic indexing creates an index with every data query. The more queries you make, the more indexes are produced, updated, and optimized to crunch latency and give your users top-quality response times.

A recent comparison between RavenDB and Couchbase demonstrates the contrast in overall performance.

But what about new indexes? What happens when there are millions of documents in the database, and a new index has to sort that while the database is serving live queries? In the latest version, staggered indexes will create indexes on the back end during certain times, and not all at once, so the new indexes being built won’t disrupt the load of the nodes in your distributed system.

OLTP Transactional Performance

An OLTP database stores transactions. It must be fully transactional. RavenDB has been so for over a decade, constantly increasing its performance within the ACID framework.

As datasets expand, the need for analysis becomes a vital part of your organization. Taking in data from as many departments as possible to cut expenses, make things more efficient, and increase your sales is as important as your “We’re open” sign.

RavenDB has expanded to enable OLAP data processing. You can take all the transactional data you are storing and push it to a data lake to combine with other systems to perform business intelligence queries.

Have Everything You Need in One Place

You shouldn’t have to pay more in time, money, development, and complexity to cobble together all the pieces that should come with your database when you download it.

RavenDB lets you work in multiple data models: Document, Graph, Key-Value, Attachments, and Time Series. You also have native features like MapReduce, Full-Text Search, and automatic indexes.

The native GUI in RavenDB shows you all the internals of your database. In a single screen, you can see how all of the nodes in your entire database cluster utilize computer memory and resources and perform.

To further visualize how your system is working with your data, plugins are available for Grafana.

To demonstrate, RavenDB offers free one-on-one demos of all these features.

Make Sure Your Database Cluster is Truly Distributed

There are two ways a distributed database passes data throughout its system. The first is called master-worker. This is where you can only write to a single node in the system but can read from several. But you still have a single point of failure.

If the master node is disabled, the entire system stalls. It’s like an octopus. You may have several arms to work with, but you still have one heart and one head. If that goes, everything goes with it.

RavenDB uses a master-master architecture. Each node inside your database cluster can read and write data. If a node goes down, the remaining nodes continue without interruption and RavenDB will rebalance the load.

If a node is located in a place where the internet connectivity goes down, that node can continue to operate offline, taking in data locally. Once the connection is restored, the node will take the data it processed and replicate it throughout your cluster.

This ensures that you will always serve user requests from the point of least latency.

Get Started Quickly and Get to Market Fast

A gaming startup stated that using RavenDB halved their time to market by 50%. Using an SQL solution would have added six months to their release schedule. Much needed time and money were freed up, and the company had an extra half a year to expand.

Using a setup wizard gets you up and running with a database in minutes. You also have a fully secured system. The latest update gives you read-only certificates, ensuring that users who only need to see your data cannot touch it.

A schemaless database does not need data labels and types to apply to every data point inside a data set. You can create, independently, data labels and values for each document. This gives you a lot of flexibility in setting up your database and even more speed in updating one.

RavenDB is nicknamed The Developers Database due to its developer-friendly features and ease of use. It was designed to take as much work off your hands so you can focus on building up a fantastic application.

Oren Eini is the CEO of RavenDB, a NoSQL Distributed Database, and RavenDB Cloud, its Managed Cloud Service (DBaaS). He has been blogging for more than 15 years using his alias Ayende Rahien.