Chapter 13

Surveying Database Internals

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Peeking under the hood of MongoDB, Membase, Hypertable, Apache Cassandra, and Berkeley DB
• Exploring the internal architectural elements of a few select NoSQL products
• Understanding the under-the-hood design choices

Learning a product or a tool involves at least three dimensions, namely:

• Understanding its semantics and syntax
• Learning by trying and using it
• Understanding its internals and knowing what is happening under the hood

In the preceding chapters, you were exposed to a considerable amount of syntax, especially in the context of MongoDB, Redis, CouchDB, HBase, and Cassandra. Many of the examples illustrated the syntax and explained the concepts so trying them out would have given you a good hands-on head start to learning the NoSQL products. In some chapters, you had the opportunity to peek under the hood. In this chapter you dive deeper into in-depth discovery by exploring the architecture and the internals of a few select NoSQL products. As with the other chapters, the set of products I chose represents different types of NoSQL products. The products discussed in this chapter made it to the list for various reasons, some of which are as follows: