Key–value Stores

When four key value data stores each claim well-known enterprises and organizations as users, it’s probably because they each have something to offer – and something different in each case. Choosing between them will depend on individual requirements or constraints. The starting points are these: Redis is in-memory with configurable trade-off between persistency and performance Riak is a distributed, fault-tolerant ... Read More »

Amazon offers its DynamoDB NoSQL database as a managed service, part of its Amazon Web Services portfolio. This immediately distinguishes it from many other key value data stores that are installed either on a user’s own servers or separate hosted servers. DynamoDB is positioned as providing guaranteed throughput and low latency independently of the volumes of data handled. The company ... Read More »

How Big a Difference Will This Make? Long promised and now finally part of Redis functionality, clustering had to wait in line. There were two reasons for it coming out later than other functionality. First, user demand for other stable characteristics such as persistence, replication, latency and introspection (determining the structure of a database at run time) were even stronger ... Read More »

Riak started life as an engine for a Salesforce automation venture and in 2009 Basho Technologies, the creator of Riak, made it an Open Source application.  Riak has been designed with Amazon’s Dynamo database and the CAP theorem (Consistency-Availability-Partition Tolerance). This has led to its capabilities of fault tolerance through automatic data replication and distribution across clusters of systems. Like ... Read More »

Blazingly fast and rapidly replicable are two of the characteristics often associated with the Redis key-value store. From its first version in 2009 by its chief developer Salvatore Sanfilippo, Redis (from REmote DIctionary Server and a play on ‘Redistribute’) has become one of the stars of the NoSQL database family. Redis can and often does work entirely in RAM. This ... Read More »

The information world has changed. Those neatly packaged rows and columns of conventional relational databases are no longer the be-all and end-all of data management. In this cyber-age, NoSQL databases now go boldly where relational databases cannot; yet where businesses and users must. NoSQL (or in fact, ‘NoRel’ for ‘not only relational’) databases are Big Data friendly. They can handle ... Read More »