3. Introduction to Key-Value Databases

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

—ALBERT EINSTEIN

Topics Covered In This Chapter

From Arrays to Key-Value Databases

Essential Features of Key-Value Databases

Properties of Keys

Characteristics of Values

Key-value databases are the simplest of the NoSQL databases and are a good place to start a detailed examination of NoSQL database options. As the name implies, the design of this type of data store is based on storing data with identifiers known as keys. This chapter introduces key-value data structures by starting with an even simpler data structure: the array.

A key-value data store is a more complex variation on the array data structure. Computer scientists have extended ...

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