Glossary  /  Data & development

Demystifying NoSQL: Revolutionizing the Database Landscape Beyond Relational Models!

NoSQL – short for “Not only SQL” – refers to databases that do not store data in relational tables but as key-value pairs, documents, column families or graphs. They are designed to scale out across many machines rather than up through ever more powerful hardware.

Data & development ·1 Min. Lesezeit ·Glossary

Origins and well-known systems

Johan Oskarsson introduced the term “NoSQL” in its present sense in 2009. Since then these systems have set out to overcome the limits of relational databases, above all in distributed storage. Well-known examples are Amazon DynamoDB and Google Bigtable, alongside the open source systems Apache Cassandra, CouchDB, OrientDB and MongoDB.

Relational models work efficiently for many small transactions and for large batch operations that mostly read. Scaling there usually means faster hardware and more memory. NoSQL instead relies on scaling out: the load is spread across any number of systems.

Key-Value databases use a hash table in which keys are entered with a respective pointer to a data set. Such images are usually provided with caching mechanisms.

Column-oriented databases are used to store very large amounts of data that are distributed across many computers. A row key addresses an entire row of a column family.

Document-oriented databases use documents that are collections of other key-value collections. The semi-structured documents are stored in file formats such as JSON.

Object databases are made up of graphs consisting of nodes, edges or relations and node properties. This graph modeling scales across many computers.

You can find more information about NoSQL here.

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