Since the early 2000s, the variety of available persistent storage solutions has increased dramatically, with dozens of open source “NoSQL” databases becoming available that function using non-relational frameworks such as columns, graphs, and JSON documents. Some of these databases include MongoDB, Couchbase, Riak, Cassandra, Neo4j, and many others.

With the improvements to the Entity API in Drupal 8, along with configuration improvements, it will become much easier to use some of these databases as Drupal backends for particular use cases. This session will give a brief overview of the alternative databases that exist today, how they store data, and their advantages and disadvantages. In particular, the session will discuss the ability to use these data stores as Drupal backends, and how they compare to MySQL in that capacity along a number of dimensions (e.g. flexibility, speed, etc.)