A workload-driven logical design approach for NoSQL document databases

Abstract

NoSQL databases are designed to manage large volumes of data. Although they do not require a default schema associated with the data, they are categorized by data models. Because of this, data organization in NoSQL databases needs significant design decisions because they affect quality requirements such as scalability, consistency and performance. In traditional database design, on the logical modeling phase, a conceptual schema is transformed into a schema with lower abstraction and suitable to the target database data model. In this context, the contribution of this paper is an approach for logical design of NoSQL document databases. Our approach consists in a process that converts a conceptual modeling into efficient logical representations for a NoSQL document database. Workload information is considered to determine an optimized logical schema, providing a better access performance for the application. We evaluate our approach through a case study in the e-commerce domain and demonstrate that the NoSQL logical structure generated by our approach reduces the amount of items accessed by the application queries.