As mentioned in this chapter's introduction, relational databases do not provide a good enough answer for the actual software development and data challenges. In today's world, you need to be fast; faster than the others. This means that data is created, updated, and changed faster than ever. Relational databases are inert and are not designed to handle fast changes and meet new business requirements as well as agile development. Handling changes in relational databases is too expensive and too slow. Achieving scalability and elasticity is also a huge challenge for relational databases. Nowadays, changes occur frequently, and data modeling is a huge challenge: you only partly know the necessary requirements and you have less time for development and deployment than ever. Furthermore, relational databases are not suitable for processing highly related and nested data or hierarchical application objects.
To handle tremendous volumes of data as well as a variety...