Modeled after UML Distilled, Martin Fowler's international best-seller, NoSQL Distilled is designed to provide you with enough background on how NoSQL databases work, so that you can choose the right data store without having to trawl the whole web to do it. Sadalage and Fowler deliberately made this a small book, so you can

get this overview pretty quickly. It won't answer your questions definitively, but it should narrow down the range of options you have to consider and help you understand what questions you need to ask in more detail.

The book comes in two parts: understand and implement. The understand part looks at core concepts you need to understand in order to make sense of NoSQL databases:

 NoSQL data models, in particular the role of aggregates and the consequences of schema-less models

 Options for distribution and the consequences for maintaining consistency (including the role of the CAP theorem)

 How map-reduce works and how it fits into this style of data storage

The implementation part then moves onto looking at some representative databases so you can a feel for how some real NoSQL databases work using Riak, MongoDB, Cassandra and Neo4j. This section also looks at how to implement evolutionary design with schema migration - an essential technique to using databases in practice. The authors finish by summing up how the real point of NoSQL is in ushering in an age of Polyglot Persistence, where different data storage technologies are used for different kinds of access.