The growing demand to store and analyse very large bodies of information, and information that is not readily suited to storing in tables (unstructured data), has led to a rapid growth in the popularity of these alternative types of database technologies.
Collectively they’ve become known as NoSQL technologies. Many of the leading technologies in this category are not developed by one company, such as Oracle or Microsoft, but instead are open source – developed by an open network of companies and independent developers and contributors akin to the way Wikipedia or Linux is developed.
Next-generation database technology
There are five key types of next-generation NoSQL data technologies. They are:- Document Store — suitable for storing large collections of documents
- Wide Column Store — for very rapid access to structured or semi structured data
- Search Engine — suitable for full text indexing of documents
- Key-Value Store – suitable for rapid access to unstructured data
- Graph Database – suitable for storing graph type data such as social networks.
