Mortadelo: A Model-Driven Framework for NoSQL Database Design

In big data contexts, the performance of relational databases can get overwhelmed, usually by numerous concurrent connections over large volumes of data. In these cases, the support of ACID transactions is dropped in favour of NoSQL data stores, which offer quick responses and high data availability. Although NoSQL systems solve this concrete performance problem, they also present some issues. For instance, the NoSQL spectrum covers a wide range of database paradigms, such as key-value, column-oriented or document stores. These paradigms differ too much from the relational model, provoking that it is not possible to make use of existent, well-known practices from relational database design. Moreover, the existence of that paradigm heterogeneity makes difficult the definition of general design practices for NoSQL data stores. We present Mortadelo, a framework devised for the automatic design of NoSQL databases. Mortadelo offers a model-driven transformation process, which starts from a technology-agnostic data model and provides an automatically generated design and implementation for the desired NoSQL data store. The main strength of our framework is its generality, i.e., Mortadelo can be extended to support any kind of NoSQL database. The validity of our approach has been checked through the implementation of a tool, which currently supports the generation of column family data stores and offers preliminary support of document-based ones.