Significance of NoSQL Databases with the Internet of Things

The significance of the Internet of Things is not that more and more devices, people and systems are ‘connected’ with one another. It is that the data generated from these ‘things’ is shared, processed, analysed and acted upon through new and innovative applications, applying completely new analysis methods and within significantly altered timeframes. The Internet of Things will drive Big Data, providing more information, from many different sources, in real-time, and allow us to gain completely new perspectives on the environments around us. The difference between machine-to-machine (M2M) and the Internet of Things (IoT) is driven by significant changes in the handling of data. In M2M, machine-generated data generally reflects well-defined data sets, communicated within established protocols and formats, and delivers well-defined alerts and notifications when values exceed their parameters. Applications in M2M make efficient use of this data as these applications have been developed hand-in-hand with what the characteristics of the data. In effect, application and data are intrinsically designed as one to meet the specific purposes of the application in fairly robust yet static model.