As any developer of social, mobile or IoT applications can attest, legacy relational database models aren’t serving all our needs anymore. There’s nothing wrong with traditional database management systems—they simply weren’t designed to address the variety and volume of data gushing through today’s digital world, not to mention the demand for speed of processing all that data in order to deliver the useful, data-driven features and functionality all of us increasingly expect of practically everything. Fortunately, a whole new world of Open-Source Database Management Systems (OSDBMS) has been built precisely to handle the diversity and complexity of today’s data and to be able to store, analyze and act on it at the speed required to make it valuable in ways like never before.

In this guide, I take a look at some of the available OSDBMS and the solutions they offer to problems we face in developing innovative apps for new data from sources like social, mobile and IoT. Although discussing all the OSDBMS players is beyond the scope of this guide, I offer a balanced look at the lead players in each of the major categories, including open-source SQL, NoSQL (including graph, document and key-value stores), and even the in-memory, GPU-accelerated products available today.