Transformation of Schema from Relational Database (RDB) to NoSQL Databases

Abstract

Relational database has been the de-facto database choice in most IT applications. In the last decade there has been increasing demand for applications that have to deal with massive and un-normalized data. To satisfy the demand, there is a big shift to use more relaxed databases in the form of NoSQL databases. Alongside with this shift, there is a need to have a structured methodology to transform existing data in relational database (RDB) to NoSQL database. The transformation from RDB to NoSQL database has become more challenging because there is no current standard on NoSQL database. The aim of this paper is to propose transformation rules of RDB Schema to various NoSQL database schema, namely document-based, column-based and graph-based databases. The rules are applied based on the type of relationships that can appear in data within a database. As a proof of concept, we apply the rules into a case study using three NoSQL databases, namely MongoDB, Cassandra, and Neo4j. A set of queries is run in these databases to demonstrate the correctness of the transformation results. In addition, the completeness of our transformation rules are compared against existing work.