After reading about NoSQL databases for years now, I finally decided to try them out a bit more in depth. One thing that prevented me doing this earlier, is that I often can’t think of a concrete use case to use them, mostly because I don’t know how to make up useful data.

This time I decided to just search google for some useful data and just use it. I found this site with free data sources on Forbes. There I decided to use the CIA factbook which contains political and geographic data about all countries in the world. Unfortunatly the CIA only provides it as HTML, so I first thought, I’d need to parse and transform it to a more useful format like JSON myself. Luckily, others have already solved this problem for me and already transformed the factbook data to JSON. Now that I have some interesting data in JSON format, I’m ready to go and now can test different databases to query against the data and extract interesting informations from it.

As I also like to use the opportunity to learn a new language, I’ll mostly do the coding in Kotlin. In my opinion it is a pretty cool language to learn and I’m really interested to see if it is the better and more modern Java it claims to be.

I’ll continuously add links on this page to my follow-up posts were I try different database engines to query against the factbook (other data):