What is key-value?
Academically, a key-value datastore would be a data storage design where information is stored in a dictionary or, in traditional computer science data structures, in a hash table. This information has an optimized, indexed part called the key, which is unique across a particular datastore. The value is the complementary part of the key and together, they are called a key-value pair. Essentially, a key-value datastore is used to store a bunch of key-value pairs, where each pair or object can be uniquely identified by its key. The value corresponding to each key could either be a single string of text, such as foobar, or could be a huge chunk of data with complex data types nested within each other.
The following table is an example of a key-value datastore with varying value types:
|
Key |
Value |
|
K1 |
foobar |
|
K2... |
