Advanced Data Management

8 Extensible Record Stores

Extensible record stores are database systems akin to Google’s BigTable system. These databases have tables as their basic data structure although with a highly flexible column management; they implement the concept of column families that act as containers for subsets of columns. Alternative names are tabular data stores, columnar data stores, wide column stores or column family stores. To avoid confusion with the column stores introduced in the previous chapter, we will stick with the more generic name extensible record store here. Although extensible record stores reuse some terminology of the relational data model, they are also akin to key-value stores because they map a unique, multidimensional key to a value. ...