A wide-column store (or extensible record store) is a type of

NoSQL NoSQL (originally meaning "Not only SQL" or "non-relational") refers to a type of database design that stores and retrieves data differently from the traditional table-based structure of relational databases. Unlike relational databases, which ...

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and a ...

.Wide Column Stores
DB-Engines Encyclopedia. It uses tables, rows, and columns, but unlike a

relational database A relational database (RDB) is a database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) is a type of database management system that stores data in a structured for ...

, the names and format of the columns can vary from row to row in the same table. A wide-column store can be interpreted as a two-dimensional key–value store.

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

's Bigtable is one of the prototypical examples of a wide-column store.

Wide-column stores versus columnar databases

Wide-column stores such as Bigtable and

Apache Cassandra Apache Cassandra is a free and open-source software, free and open-source database management system designed to handle large volumes of data across multiple Commodity computing, commodity servers. The system prioritizes availability and scalab ...

are not column stores in the original sense of the term, since their two-level structures do not use a columnar data layout. In genuine column stores, a columnar data layout is adopted such that each column is stored separately on disk. Wide-column stores do often support the notion of column families that are stored separately. However, each such column family typically contains multiple columns that are used together, similar to traditional relational database tables. Within a given column family, all data is stored in a row-by-row fashion, such that the columns for a given row are stored together, rather than each column being stored separately. Wide-column stores that support column families are also known as ''column family databases''.

Notable examples

Notable wide-column stores DB-Engines Ranking of Wide Column Stores
include: * Apache Accumulo *

Apache HBase HBase is an open-source non-relational distributed database modeled after Google's Bigtable and written in Java. It is developed as part of Apache Software Foundation's Apache Hadoop project and runs on top of HDFS (Hadoop Distributed Fil ...

* Bigtable *

DataStax DataStax, Inc. is a real-time data for AI company based in Santa Clara, California. Its product Astra DB is a cloud Database as a service, database-as-a-service based on Apache Cassandra. DataStax also offers DataStax Enterprise (DSE), an on-pr ...

Enterprise (uses Apache Cassandra) *

Astra DB (uses Apache Cassandra) * Hypertable * Azure Tables * ScyllaDB

References

NoSQL Databases Database management systems {{compu-stub