Databases Intermediate

What is NoSQL?

A category of databases that store data in non-tabular formats, optimized for specific data models and access patterns.

NoSQL databases sacrifice some relational features for scalability and flexibility. Types include document stores (MongoDB — JSON documents), key-value stores (Redis — simple lookups), column-family stores (Cassandra — wide columns), and graph databases (Neo4j — relationships).

NoSQL databases often provide eventual consistency rather than strong consistency, horizontal scaling, and schema flexibility. They excel at specific use cases like caching, real-time analytics, and content management.

Related Terms

The default index type in most databases that organizes data in a balanced tree structure for efficient searching, sorting, and range queries.

Write-Ahead Log (WAL)

A technique where changes are first written to a log before being applied to the database, ensuring crash recovery and data integrity.

The process of copying and maintaining database data across multiple servers for redundancy, failover, and read scaling.

A virtual table defined by a SQL query that provides a simplified or restricted view of data from one or more tables.

A sequence of database operations that are treated as a single unit — either all succeed or all are rolled back.

Full-Text Search

A technique for searching natural language text in databases using word stemming, ranking, and relevance scoring.

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