The more I read about NoSQL, the more it begins to sound like a column oriented database to me.
What's the difference between NoSQL (e.g. CouchDB, Cassandra, MongoDB) and a column oriented database (e.g. Vertica, MonetDB)?
+1
A:
Some NoSQL databases are column-oriented databases, and some SQL databases are column-oriented as well. Whether the database is column or row-oriented is a physical storage implementation detail of the database and can be true of both relational and non-relational (NoSQL) databases.
Vertica, for example, is a column-oriented relational database so it wouldn't actually qualify as a NoSQL datastore.
A "NoSQL movement" datastore is better defined as being non-relational, shared-nothing, horizontally scalable database without (necessarily) ACID guarantees. Some column-oriented databases can be characterized this way. Besides column stores, NoSQL implementations also include document stores, object stores, tuple stores, and graph stores.
Maxx Daymon
2010-05-09 18:02:56