Document-based or document-oriented databases became prominent as a means of storing data that had variable structures; that is, there was no fixed schema that each record would fit into all the time. Additionally, the document may have both a structured as well as an unstructured part.
Structured data is, in essence, data that can be stored in a tabular format such as in a spreadsheet. Data stored in Excel spreadsheets or MySQL tables all belong to the class of structured datasets. Data that cannot be represented in a strict tabular format such as books, audio files, video files, or social network messages are considered unstructured data. As such, in document-oriented databases, we will primarily work with structured ...
