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 spa ...

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

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

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'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 a ...

* Apache Cassandra * Apache HBase * Bigtable * DataStax Enterprise (uses Apache Cassandra) * DataStax Astra DB (uses Apache Cassandra) * Hypertable * Azure Tables * Scylla (database)

References

NoSQL Databases {{compu-stub