Engineering, Technology & Applied Science Research Vol. 5, No. 5, 2015, 850-853 850

This paper concludes with general recommendations for IT 
educators, database engineers, and other IT professionals.
Keywords-information technology; database design; big data; 
MongoDB
I.
I
NTRODUCTION 
This paper discusses the latest emerging database 
technology and concepts. The content is aimed at information 
technology and cloud computing students as well as working 
database designers and administrators surveying professional 
and scholarly literature, and considering retraining. In order to 
demonstrate certain aspects of big data, it is first necessary to 
briefly review the qualities of modern cloud based databases. 
This also involves revisiting some of the fundamentals of 
database technologies. Providing an instructional manual is not 
the purpose of this paper. The aim is to demonstrate the 
primary activities and concepts that current IT students and 
database engineers need to know in order to work 
professionally with big data applications. Then the paper 
relates the essential learning objectives and their relevance for 
industry practice and to the IT sector in general. The following 
activities can be done in the Database Management Systems 
and Database Administration courses. Students in these two 
courses are not required to do extensive programming or create 
new applications. Prior to the demonstrations in section IV, this 
paper covers the fundamentals of big data and MongoDB in 
sections II and III with a literature review. Finally, the paper 
summarizes and reflects on the authors’ technical 
experimentation along with conclusions and recommendations 
in section V.
II.
C
LOUD COMPUTING AND THE IMPACT ON BIG DATA 
Cloud Computing services operate on shared and remote 
resources on the internet rather than on an organization’s own 
local servers or on the end users’ own personal computers or 
devices [1-2]. As a result, cloud based services achieve greater 
availability, flexibility, and scalability. A wide range of 
platforms and applications are currently delivered under the 
banner of cloud computing.
Data management is an important issue in cloud computing 
as millions of people use cloud based hardware and software 
services that constantly store, update, and retrieve a great 
amount of data. Big Data is the term used to describe massive 
volumes of both structured and unstructured data [3]. It is 
difficult and inefficient to process this amount and type of data 
using traditional database applications [4]. One example of big 
data comes from the constantly expanding social media 
platforms and their users. Another example is from the 
increasingly complex health care industry offering new devices 
and web based applications for the customers. All of this data is 
hosted on remote servers on the cloud. Managing and running 
large and ‘live’ databases on the internet involves many 
technical aspects such as virtualization, concurrency control, 
operating systems, network administration, process scheduling, 
load balancing, transaction management, and database design.
III.
U
NDERSTANDING BIG DATA APPLICATIONS
In order to manage big data, many NoSQL (Not only SQL) 
databases have been introduced in recent years. These NoSQL 
databases handle data in ways different from the tables and 

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