Working with the X DevAPI

The X DevAPI is available in MySQL Shell and the official MySQL connectors for various programming languages. The X DevAPI is what provides the NoSQL interface for MySQL. A NoSQL interface is a way to work with a database without having to use SQL. This allows you to work with a database without using or learning SQL.

Note

NoSQL is a term used to classify database interfaces that are not SQL; in most cases, the interface that is provided is based on JSON and tries to let a database behave in a way that's more similar to the APIs that most web services provide. Also, most NoSQL interfaces don't require you to have a pre-defined format of your data (known as a schema); this is called schema-less.

The main benefit of this is that it feels more natural to developers. The drawback is that a lot of the flexibility that SQL provides is not available in the X DevAPI, making it more difficult to do things such as reporting. On the other hand, having...