Cloud Databases for Internet-of-Things Data

The Internet of Things (IoT) is posing new challenges and opportunities for data management and analysis techniques. One of the major problems is how to handle an increasing amount of data, with a variety of data types and data sources, in order to meet application-specific performance requirements. In this article, we address the suitability of different types of databases for storing and accessing IoT data in the cloud. Specifically, we compare the performance of SQL (i.e., MySQL) and NoSQL databases (i.e., MongoDB, CouchDB, and Redis) in a cloud environment by using different types of IoT data, namely, sensor readings and multimedia. We conducted a performance evaluation of the considered database systems through extensive experiments in the cloud. Our results show that SQL and NoSQL databases are both viable for IoT data, even though there is a high variability in the performance of the different NoSQL databases considered.