Mastering Flask Web Development - Second Edition

Column family stores

Column family stores, also known as wide column stores, have many things in common with both key-value stores and document stores. Column family stores are the fastest type of NoSQL database because they are designed for large applications. Their main advantage is their ability to handle terabytes of data and still have very fast read and write speeds by distributing the data across several servers in an intelligent way.

Column family stores are also the hardest to understand, due in part to the vernacular of column family stores, as they use many of the same terms as RDBMSes, but with wildly different meanings. In order to clearly understand what a column family store is, let's jump straight into an example. Let's create ...