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

NoSQL A NoSQL (originally referring to "non- SQL" or "non-relational") database provides a mechanism for storage and retrieval of data that is modeled in means other than the tabular relations used in relational databases. Such databases have existed ...

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases sp ...

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

relational database A relational database is a (most commonly digital) database based on the relational model of data, as proposed by E. F. Codd in 1970. A system used to maintain relational databases is a relational database management system (RDBMS). Many relatio ...

, 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.

Wide-column stores versus columnar databases

Wide-column stores such as

Bigtable Bigtable is a fully managed wide-column and key-value NoSQL database service for large analytical and operational workloads as part of the Google Cloud portfolio. History Bigtable development began in 2004.. It is now used by a number of Googl ...

and

Apache Cassandra Cassandra is a free and open-source, distributed, wide-column store, NoSQL database management system designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers, providing high availability with no single point of failure. Cassandr ...

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 {{Short description, A database project that organizes data in packed columns A column family is a database object that contains columns of related data. It is a tuple (pair) that consists of a key–value pair, where the key is mapped to a value t ...

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''.

History

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

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

Notable wide-column stores

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

Apache Accumulo Apache Accumulo is a highly scalable sorted, distributed key-value store based on Google's Bigtable. It is a system built on top of Apache Hadoop, Apache ZooKeeper, and Apache Thrift. Written in Java, Accumulo has cell-level access labels and ...

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 File Syst ...

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

Enterprise (uses Apache Cassandra) *

Astra DB (uses Apache Cassandra) *

Hypertable Hypertable was an open-source software project to implement a database management system inspired by publications on the design of Google's Bigtable. Hypertable runs on top of a distributed file system such as the Apache HDFS, GlusterFS or the ...

* Azure Tables *

Scylla (database) ScyllaDB is an open-source distributed NoSQL wide-column data store. It was designed to be compatible with Apache Cassandra while achieving significantly higher throughputs and lower latencies. It supports the same protocols as Cassandra ( CQL an ...

References

NoSQL Databases {{compu-stub