An Empirical Study on the Design and Evolution of NoSQL Database Schemas
This provides empirical data on NoSQL schema practices for software engineers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing recommendations.
The study analyzed how software engineers design and evolve domain models in NoSQL databases by examining ten real-world Java projects, finding insights into schema sizes and denormalization practices.
We study how software engineers design and evolve their domain model when building applications against NoSQL data stores. Specifically, we target Java projects that use object-NoSQL mappers to interface with schema-free NoSQL data stores. Given the source code of ten real-world database applications, we extract the implicit NoSQL database schema. We capture the sizes of the schemas, and investigate whether the schema is denormalized, as is recommended practice in data modeling for NoSQL data stores. Further, we analyze the entire project history, and with it, the evolution history of the NoSQL database schema. In doing so, we conduct the so far largest empirical study on NoSQL schema design and evolution.