10 Common NoSQL Use Cases for Modern Applications

Over the last decade, NoSQL database technology has experienced explosive growth and accelerated use by large enterprises for mission critical applications. Thousands of enterprises are deploying NoSQL – across virtually every industry for customer-facing, revenue-driving applications that serve hundreds of millions of consumers, business customers, and citizens. 

These organizations are turning to NoSQL to overcome limitations of decades-old relational database technology. In many cases, they are replacing those databases with NoSQL – at a fraction of the cost. In short, NoSQL is now ready for enterprise prime time.

10 Common NoSQL Use Cases

This ebook provides a guide to 10 key examples of NoSQL use in modern applications seen in the database industry today. The list is based on Couchbase’s expertise and conversations with customers and prospects over the past decade. The use cases are:

Personalization

Personalization is fast becoming an opportunity, and a challenge. It’s an opportunity to make the right engagement – an ad, a coupon, a recommendation, and more – with the right visitor at the right time. But the ability to ingest, process, and utilize the amount of data necessary to create personalized experiences is a challenge for relational databases. An example of this NoSQL application can be seen in Dominos’ use of unified real-time data to power personalized marketing campaigns leading to repeat customers.

Profile Management

User profile management is core to web and mobile applications. It enables online transactions, user preferences, user authentication, and more. As the number of users, complexity of user profile data, and user experience expectations accelerate, relational database technology struggles to keep up with scalability, data flexibility, and performance requirements. Nexon leverages Couchbase’s JSON document model to easily evolve user profiles on-the-fly, making for painless updates. The speed and scale of Capella proved more than capable to meet the demands of gamers.

Augmented Real-time Analytics

The ability to extract information from operational data in real time is critical for an agile enterprise — in particular, the ability to increase operational efficiency, reduce costs, and increase revenue by acting on current data immediately. NoSQL is engineered for real-time application analytics. Wibmo uses real-time analytics to monitor up to 5 million payment transactions per day with 50ms-1sec response times.

Content Management

Regardless of industry, every enterprise needs to engage users with rich, informative content. It’s a fundamental requirement of doing business today. Content isn’t limited to text or neatly structured data. It includes all kinds of semi- and unstructured data: Images, audio, video, presentations, and much more. And it’s not limited to content produced by the brand – it includes user-generated content such as photos, videos, reviews, ratings, and comments. Sky, Europe’s largest media company and TV broadcaster, uses Couchbase to keep compelling content available during peak demand for over 22 million subscribers.

Catalog

Catalogs are not only referenced by web and mobile applications, they enable point-of-sale terminals, self-service kiosks, and more. In addition to product and service catalogs, there are reference catalogs for financial assets, employee data, digital media, and more. Catalogs may often contain user-generated content such as images, reviews, ratings, and comments. Tesco, the world’s largest Europe-based retailer, is adopting Couchbase Server for multiple use cases, including a centralized service for storing and managing data for millions of products, which can be leveraged across the company.

Customer 360° View

Creating and maintaining a unified view of the customer has been an important but elusive goal for enterprises. Customers expect a consistent experience, regardless of channel. And the enterprise wants to capitalize on upsell / cross-sell opportunities and provide the highest level of customer service in a cost effective manner. However, as the number of products and services, channels, brands, and business units increases, customer data becomes fragmented in silos. CenterEdge provides amusement parks and other family entertainment centers with software solutions for 360-degree customer insights at the point-of-sale, online ticketing and other essential business functions.

Mobile Applications

Mobile phones and tablets are now the dominant platform for search, shopping, and other applications. Mobile users spend only 20% of their time in browsers and 80% within apps. Mobile applications present challenges with scalability, performance, and availability that relational databases are ill-equipped to address. MOLO17 turned to Capella App Services to provide a cloud database, an embeddable mobile database, and automatic synchronization between the two  – making it the perfect technology for its critical safety and rescue application. Now regatta participants can be rescued in a fraction of the time it would take previously.

Internet of Things

Today, some 20 billion devices are connected to the Internet – everything from smartphones and tablets to home appliances and systems installed in cars, hospitals, and warehouses. These devices receive data on environment, location, movement, temperature, weather, and more from 50 billion sensors. This data can be leveraged by enterprises in manufacturing, health

care, retail, security, transportation, and many other industries. Verizon provides high performance at scale for billions of data points with automated sync between devices and the cloud. Verizon’s ThingSpace is an innovative end-to-end IoT development platform that helps enterprise customers build and deploy IoT solutions.

Digital Communication

Today’s world relies on digital communication in the form of mobile text messaging, online chat, real-time collaboration, and more. However, enabling millions of users to communicate in real-time requires both performance and availability at scale, and it’s a challenge for relational databases. Viber connects more than 1 billion users worldwide through high-quality audio and video calls, messaging, and more. To process up to 15 billion events per day, Viber implemented Couchbase in a multi-layered AWS architecture.

Fraud Detection

For financial services enterprises, fraud detection and risk analytics are essential to reducing profit loss, minimizing financial exposure, and complying with regulations. The process impacts both the enterprise and its customers: It relies on data – rules, customer information, transaction information, location, time of day, and more – applied at scale and in real-time. FICO uses Couchbase to support the world’s #1 fraud detection platform, delivering high availability alongside high transactional volume.

A New Era of Enterprise Database Infrastructure

Based on our conversations with customers across every industry, nearly all of them assert that NoSQL is a critical component of their business. The top benefits NoSQL emphasize include improved application performance and availability as well as improved resource and operational efficiency.

NoSQL is enabling enterprises to increase business agility, achieve a faster time to market, and operate at a global scale while reducing costs. In addition, enterprises are modernizing database infrastructure by implementing database as a service (DBaaS) to meet the requirements of individual business units with and without multi-tenant cloud infrastructure, public or private, to improve resource and operational efficiency.

Check out our 10 Common NoSQL Use Cases for Modern Applications eBook for a deeper dive on these use cases and examples of how our customers are leveraging Couchbase.