Could NoSQL Replace Relational Databases in FMIS?

Abstract

FMIS (farm management information systems) is the computational tool responsible to process data to get information that improves farmers' decision support. The data manipulated in FMIS is originated from diverse sources, stored, and read whenever necessary without subsequent modifications, thus dismissing the necessity of complex data storage systems such as offered by the relational model. Due to its capability to handle with high performance, a large amount of unstructured data and to reduce the complexity of applications, the NoSQL data storage model, a convenient alternative to relational model, recently gained a lot of attention in the information systems market. This way, this chapter discusses how NoSQL models could improve the FMIS architecture and performance when used as data storage. Some works that have already benefited from NoSQL model adoption are reviewed and convenient use cases where both data storage models could be well used in FMIS's architecture are advised and discussed.