Teaching Case: Introduction to NoSQL in a Traditional Database Course.

1. INTRODUCTION In the context of a traditional Structured Query Language (SQL) database management course, students will learn concepts and skills geared around typical SQL relational databases, such as entities, relationships, normalization, and data structuring. They also learn SQL is typically used to create tables and store data into databases, and that they will need to query data in order to build knowledge from them. Once the students learn how to query traditional databases, they will be introduced to a NoSQL database management system. NoSQL is a relatively new technology that many companies use to collect big data, which is quickly becoming an integral part of modern information systems. The low cost of data storage coupled with cloud based infrastructures allows not only the major, multinational organizations, but also small and medium enterprises to utilize big data (Purcell, 2014). Big data is also becoming an essential aspect of many of today's web applications. Social media sites are storing massive amounts of data on a daily basis. For instance, Facebook logs 135 billion messages per month, and Twitter stores seven terabytes of data every day. Some of the challenges in the use of big data are in identifying how to handle the velocity at which data are collected and deciding the most effective way to store the data. In many cases, traditional SQL databases cannot process data fast enough. In other cases, traditional relational database structures are not flexible enough to handle the varying data types and the inconsistent manner in which the data are collected. To deal with these challenges, major Internet companies, like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon, are moving to NoSQL databases. The term, NoSQL, coined in the late 90's to mean "Not Only SQL," describes non-relational database systems (Berg, Seymour, and Goel, 2013). NoSQL databases allow for large amounts of variable and unstructured data to be stored and used. Common uses for these databases are session stores, user profile stores, mobile apps, e-commerce, and third-party data aggregation (Meijer and Bierman, 2011; Moniruzzaman and Hossain, 2013; Stonebraker, 2010). Because of the challenges of big data, Information Systems (IS) students need to develop a basic understanding of how NoSQL databases work in modern information environments. This need is especially significant with the adoption of cloud-based infrastructures, which makes using this kind of database very likely during their careers. So, a clear understanding of what a NoSQL database looks like, how it differs from a traditional SQL database, and how to use the non-traditional database is necessary for IS college majors in the near future. This paper presents a teaching case for adding a NoSQL lesson to an existing traditional relational database course. This NoSQL teaching case includes instructions on integrating the teaching module into a traditional database management course. Incorporating this NoSQL teaching case into both undergraduate and graduate database management courses will give students experience with this emerging technology. The case uses CouchDB (Couchdb.apache.org), an open source NoSQL database management system software that students can either install on their personal computers or use as a cloud-based service. 2. A BRIEF REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE Goes (2014), editor-in-chief of MIS Quarterly, identified an industry gap in the understanding of big data, its challenges, and its potentials. In the past several years, big data has emerged as a new trend in the field of information technology because of the increasing amounts of data organizations in all sectors are generating, collecting, storing, and analyzing. Goes further explains IS groups are acknowledging this industry gap by offering academic programs specializing in data and business analytics that develop students' skills in data science. The term, big data, describes datasets so large and complex that they are difficult to process using traditional processing applications. …