Evaluating Erlang database structures for building statistics in telecommunications : Comparing non-relational and relational databases in Mnesia

Sammanfattning: Mobile subscriptions are steadily increasing, making it more relevant to collect data and make useful statistics. To handle these large data sets, robust databases must be built. Two important factors for databases are storing the information persistently and having an adequate read and write speed to the database. This thesis project will study the implementation to fulfill these factors along with the comparison between a non-relational database structure and a relational database structure. The system will be written in the database management system Mnesia in the programming language Erlang. This study was conducted at Mobile Arts AB in Stockholm, Sweden. The company requested a system with different modules to build a query language used to extract relevant statistics. Large amounts of data should be processed through the file processor and stored in a database efficiently. A system based on two different database structures was built and compared to achieve the most efficient system among the two database structures. To measure the performance of the system and to compare the database structures, benchmarks were executed to determine the most efficient method. The results show that the non-relational database has a faster input processing speed compared to the relational one, while the relational database structure was faster in output processing. The conclusion is that the non-relational database works better for the system of this thesis project.