Key–value database
data storage paradigm designed for storing, retrieving, and managing associative arrays
A key-value database, or key-value store, is a data storage paradigm designed for storing, retrieving, and managing associative arrays, a data structure more commonly known today as a dictionary. Dictionaries contain a collection of objects, or records, which in turn have many different fields within them. These records are stored and retrieved using a key that uniquely identifies the record, and is used to find the data within the database.
A lack of standardization, limited transaction support, and relatively simple query interfaces long restricted many key-value systems to specialized uses, but the rapid move to cloud computing after 2010 helped drive renewed interest in them as part of the broader NoSQL movement. Some graph databases, such as ArangoDB, are also key–value databases internally, adding the concept of relationships (pointers) between records as a first-class data type.
Definition
Key-value databases differ from the better known relational databases (RDB). RDBs pre-define the data structure in the database as a series of tables containing fields with well-defined data types. Exposing the data types to the database program allows it to apply various optimizations. In contrast, key-value systems treat the value as opaque to the database itself, and typically support only simple operations such as storing, retrieving, updating, and deleting a value by its key. This offers considerable flexibility and makes such systems well suited to low-latency, high-throughput workloads dominated by direct key lookups, but less suitable for applications that require complex queries or explicit relationships among records.
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This entry incorporates text from “Key–value database” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.