Ubuntu Unleashed 2013 Edition: Covering 12.10 and 13.04, Eighth Edition

Key/Value Stores

Key/value stores are listed first because they are the simplest of the NoSQL databases, at least in the sense of interactions. You have a piece of data of any type; this is your value. You give it a name of some sort; this is your key. Any time you need that specific piece of data, you ask for it using the key. Values might be bits of text, binaries, pretty much anything, and the data type does not need to be defined in advance, or often at all. The database never needs to know what the value object is, just that it is stored using the given key. These databases have no schema. The contents might be vastly different from one another in type, size, domain, and so on. It is the client, the application that uses the database, that ...