NoSQL For Dummies

Chapter 6

Key-Value Use Cases

In This Chapter

Handling transient user information

Managing high-speed caching of your data

Key-value stores can scale prodigiously, and this capability is reflected in the various ways that they’re used. Maybe you need to deliver hundreds of thousands of targeted web advertisements every second, perhaps to users in different countries, in different languages, and to different categories of websites. Speed is critical. You want your ads to appear as the web page appears so that the ad doesn’t slow down the user’s experience. When people visit a blog looking for information, they want to see the blog, not wait for the ads.

On the other hand, maybe you have a globally distributed web application and need to store session information or user preferences, but you don’t want to clog up your transactional database systems with this data. Or perhaps your requirements are even simpler. You just need to cache data from another system but serve it at a very high speed.

Whatever your needs for high-speed retrieval, key-value NoSQL stores can help.

Managing User Information

There’s mission-critical data, and there’s supporting data. It’s okay if your mission-critical data appears a little slowly because you want to be sure it’s safe and properly managed. But ...