NoSQL For Dummies

Chapter 4

Common Features of Key-Value Stores

In This Chapter

Ensuring that your data is always available

Deciding on how to add keys to your data

Managing your data in a key-value store

Key-value stores are no frills stores that generally delegate all value-handling to the application code itself. Like other types of NoSQL databases, they are highly distributed across a cluster of commodity servers.

A particular benefit of key-value stores is their simplicity. Redis, for example, is only 20,000 lines of code! It can be embedded into an application easily and quickly.

Throughput is the name of the game. Many using a key-value store will sacrifice database features to gain better performance. Key-value stores lack secondary indexes, and many of them eschew synchronized updates (thus also eschewing guaranteed transactional consistency) to their data’s replicas in order to maximize throughput.

In this chapter, I cover how to configure a key-value store to ensure that no matter what happens to the database servers in your cluster, your data is always available.

Key-value stores also place some constraints on how you model your data for storage. I talk about the best strategies for ...