A hands–on guide to leveraging NoSQL databases NoSQL databases are an efficient and powerful tool for storing and manipulating vast quantities of data. Most NoSQL databases scale well as data grows. In addition, they are often malleable and flexible enough to accommodate semi–structured and sparse data sets. This comprehensive hands–on guide presents fundamental concepts and practical solutions for getting you ready to use NoSQL databases. Expert author Shashank Tiwari begins with a helpful introduction on the subject of NoSQL, explains its characteristics and typical uses, and looks at where it fits in the application stack. Unique insights help you choose which NoSQL solutions are best for solving your specific data storage needs. Professional NoSQL: Demystifies the concepts that relate to NoSQL databases, including column–family oriented stores, key/value databases, and document databases. Delves into installing and configuring a number of NoSQL products and the Hadoop family of products. Explains ways of storing, accessing, and querying data in NoSQL databases through examples that use MongoDB, HBase, Cassandra, Redis, CouchDB, Google App Engine Datastore and more. Looks at architecture and internals. Provides guidelines for optimal usage, performance tuning, and scalable configurations. Presents a number of tools and utilities relating to NoSQL, distributed platforms, and scalable processing, including Hive, Pig, RRDtool, Nagios, and more.