DZone Best of the Year: NoSQL Zone Edition

Happy New Year and Welcome to 2015! As we head into the new year, let's take a look back at what have been the most popular topics of interest in the NoSQL Zone over this past year. We present to you here DZone's most popular NoSQL articles from 2014:

1. When to Use MongoDB Rather than MySQL (or Other RDBMS): The Billing Example - Moshe Kaplan
   

   
   NoSQL has been a hot buzz in the air for a pretty long time (well, it's not only a buzz anymore), and MongoDB has been a major player. However, when should we really use it? 

2. Cassandra vs. MongoDB: Why Your Database Should be Boring - Alec Noller

   This recent article presents a comparison of Cassandra and MongoDB, although it's pretty clearly weighted in one direction. Yes, saying bad things about MongoDB is nothing new, but this article is interesting in that the anti-MongoDB framing is really not the core of his point. Ultimately, this is all about Cassandra.

3. NoSQL Databases Compared: Differences, Strengths, and Examples - Alec Noller

4. There's been a lot of comparison of SQL and NoSQL lately, but what is to be done if you're already sold on NoSQL and just don't know which database is for you, or your project in particular? To meet that need, check out this rather thorough comparison of NoSQL databases.

5. When to Use GridFS on MongoDB - Dharshan Rangegowda

   GridFS is a simple file system abstraction on top of MongoDB. If you are familiar with Amazon S3, GridFS is a very similar abstraction. Now why does a document oriented database like MongoDB provide a file layer abstraction? Turns out there are some very good reasons.

6. MongoDB Time Series: Introducing the Aggregation Framework - Vlad Mihalcea

   In previous posts, the author talked about batch importing and the out-of-the-box MongoDB performance. Recently, though, MongoDB was awarded DBMS of the year, so he therefore decided to offer a more thorough analysis of its real-life usage.

7. How to Migrate from MySQL to MongoDB - Moshe Kaplan

   Over the last week, the author was working on a key project to migrate a BI platform from MySQL to MongoDB. They chose MongoDB as the platform data infrastructure to support high data insert rate and scale data analysis. In this article, the author shares some of lessons he learned during the process.

8. Connecting to Cassandra from Java - Dustin Marx

   The Cassandra Java Driver makes it easy to access Cassandra from Java applications. Cassandra also features significant Java-based configuration and monitoring and can even be customized with Java.

The top articles here were chosen based on the amount of pageviews they received, but they are just the beginning of a long list of great articles we've had in the NoSQL Zone this year. Feel free to add in the comments what your favorite articles were this year. We're looking forward to another great year of content in the NoSQL Zone!