What Is a Key-Value Database?
The key-value database defined
A key-value database is a type of nonrelational database that uses a simple key-value method to store data. A key-value database stores data as a collection of key-value pairs in which a key serves as a unique identifier. Both keys and values can be anything, ranging from simple objects to complex compound objects. Key-value databases are highly partitionable and allow horizontal scaling at scales that other types of databases cannot achieve. For example, Amazon DynamoDB allocates additional partitions to a table if an existing partition fills to capacity and more storage space is required.
The following diagram shows an example of data stored as key-value pairs in DynamoDB.
Use cases
Session store
A session-oriented application such as a web application starts a session when a user logs in and is active until the user logs out or the session times out. During this period, the application stores all session-related data either in the main memory or in a database. Session data may include user profile information, messages, personalized data and themes, recommendations, targeted promotions, and discounts. Each user session has a unique identifier. Session data is never queried by anything other than a primary key, so a fast key-value store is a better fit for session data. In general, key-value databases may provide smaller per-page overhead than relational databases.
Shopping cart
During the holiday shopping season, an e-commerce website may receive billions of orders in seconds. Key-value databases can handle the scaling of large amounts of data and extremely high volumes of state changes while servicing millions of simultaneous users through distributed processing and storage. Key-value databases also have built-in redundancy, which can handle the loss of storage nodes.
Popular key-value databases
Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon DynamoDB is a nonrelational database that delivers reliable performance at any scale. It's a fully managed, multi-region, multi-master database that provides consistent single-digit millisecond latency, and offers built-in security, backup and restore, and in-memory caching. In DynamoDB, an Item is composed of a primary or composite key and a flexible number of attributes. There is no explicit limitation on the number of attributes associated with an individual item, but the aggregate size of an item, including all the attribute names and attribute values, cannot exceed 400 KB. A table is a collection of data items, just as a table in a relational database is a collection of rows. Each table can have an infinite number of data items.
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