NoSQL or RDBMS for Data Analysis

Question

Hi, i ask myself if i should try to use a NoSQL database or a SQL Database. I have read a lot, but would like to hear some people who hav experience with NoSQL.
My situation is as follows:
We have a not so complex relational database schema. We do reasearch on recommender systems and therefore monitor the user interactions with a specific portal site. We later want to analyse the collected data to show the user what he has done at the portal and to generate recommendations based on what he has done on the portal. Since we don't know what kind of analyses we will do in future it's a lot of experimenting. But it will contain a lot of count, group by, avg, order by, etc queries.

Would in this scenario a NoSQL Database make sense? I have read, that NoSQL is not that performant in doing such aggregation functions. I know that e.g. for HBase and Cassandra there is Hive/Pig, but even simple order by statements are very slow.

Thanks in Advance!

Answer 1

You say your schema is already relational. If you have relational data, a RDBMS sounds like the right way to go. Especially if you're always doing structured queries over data with a specific schema, unless you have a particular reason to favor a NoSQL solution I think you'll be much happier with a fine database like my personal pick, PostgreSQL!