Performance Evaluation of SQL and NoSQL Database Management Systems in a Cluster

In  this  study,  we  evaluate  the  performance  of  SQL  and  NoSQL  database  management  systems  namely; Cassandra, CouchDB, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and RethinkDB.  We use a cluster of  four  nodes to run the database  systems,  with  external  load  generators.The  evaluation  is  conducted  using  data  from  Telenor Sverige,  a  telecommunication  company  that  operates in  Sweden.  The  experiments  are  conducted  using three  datasets  of  different  sizes.The  write  throughput  and  latency  as  well  as  the  read  throughput  and latency are evaluated for four queries; namely distance query, k-nearest neighbour query, range query, and region  query.  For  write  operations  Cassandra  has  the  highest  throughput  when  multiple  nodes  are  used, whereas  PostgreSQL  has  the  lowest  latency  and  the  highest  throughput  for  a  single  node.  For  read operations  MongoDB  has  the  lowest  latency  for  all  queries.  However,  Cassandra  has  the  highest throughput  for  reads.  The  throughput  decreasesas  the  dataset  size  increases  for  both  write  and  read,  for both  sequential  as  well  as  random  order  access.  However,  this  decrease  is  more  significant  for  random read and write. In this study, we present the experience we had with these different database management systems including setup and configuration complexity.