A performance evaluation of in-memory databases

The popularity of NoSQL databases has increased due to the need of (1) processing vast amount of data faster than the relational database management systems by taking the advantage of highly scalable architecture, (2) flexible (schema-free) data structure, and, (3) low latency and high performance. Despite that memory usage is not major criteria to evaluate performance of algorithms, since these databases serve the data from memory, their memory usages are also experimented alongside the time taken to complete each operation in the paper to reveal which one uses the memory most efficiently. Currently there exists over 225 NoSQL databases that provide different features and characteristics. So it is necessary to reveal which one provides better performance for different data operations. In this paper, we experiment the widely used in-memory databases to measure their performance in terms of (1) the time taken to complete operations, and (2) how efficiently they use memory during operations. As per the results reported in this paper, there is no database that provides the best performance for all data operations. It is also proved that even though a RDMS stores its data in memory, its overall performance is worse than NoSQL databases.