Chapter 5. Where Do You Store Your Stuff?

I'm like a squirrel. Once in a while, I leave money in secret stashes around the house in case I get mugged or just spend too much in a month. I truly forget where all my stashes are, and that is kind of funny and sad (for me).

Now, imagine you're storing something equally important or even more important than money, for instance, client data or even your company data. Could you allow yourself to store it in places that could later be lost or accessible to someone who could meddle with your "stash"? We are in the information era; information is power!

In the web application world, we have two big players for data storage: relational databases and NoSQL databases. The first is the traditional way where your data is stored inside tables and columns and where transactions matter, ACID is expected and normalization is the key (pun intended)! It uses SQL to store and retrieve data. In the second way, things get a little wild...