Abstract
Dominance of relational DBMS technology is being challenged by rapidly advancing requirements of new types of applications that need to manage massive amounts of complex data. The latest challenge is to provide effective data management for cloud computing environments.
A number of non-relational data stores have been implemented and deployed to run over thousands of commodity servers and process petabytes of data. Proponents of the NoSQL movement argue that relational databases are being superseded by more advanced database technology designed to take advantage of cloud infrastructure.
In this paper we give a balanced discussion of the advantages and drawbacks of RDBMS systems and NoSQL data stores, and describe research efforts to extend the relational databases so that they can operate effectively on cloud infrastructure.