Some key concepts
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
5:53 PM
Some key concepts
Any datastore can be represented by a collection of sets of <key,value> pairs where:
The key is a unique identifier for data. 
The value might be data associated with the key, or alternatively, a key to other data.  
(this might be considered the fundamental theorem of database theory; the resulting representation of data is called 4th normal form).
Thus distributed datastores can concentrate on being able to store and retrieve key-value pairs rather than tables and rows. 