

NoSQL databases are characterized by their capacity to store non-tabular (document-oriented) data and the ability to so without first defining a database schema. StreamScape Application Dataspaces™ allow you to store arbitrary data such as as key-value pairs ((Also referred to as Tuples)), Objects, XML or JSON documents. Data does not need to confirm to a tabular, pre-defined schema from the perspective of the database management system. Due to this schema-less nature, Streamcape  supports a scale out approach to growth, increasing data and I/O capacity by adding more servers to a cluster; and without any change to application software. By contrast, traditional relational database management systems scale up by adding more capacity including CPU, memory and disk to accommodate growth.

Relational databases store information in relations which must be defined, or modified, before data can be stored. A relation is simply a table of rows, where each row in a given relation has a fixed set of columns. These columns are consistent across each row in a relation. Tables can be further connected through cross-table references (JOINS or FOREIGN KEYS). One table, could hold rows of all individual citizens residing in a town. Another table, could have rows consisting of parent, child and relationship fields. The first two fields could be references to rows in the citizens table while the third field describes the parental relationship between the persons in the first two fields such as father or mother.

