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Document Stores

Document stores, also called document-oriented database systems, are characterized by their schema-free organization of data.

That means:

• Records do not need to have a uniform structure, i.e. different records may have different columns.
• The types of the values of individual columns can be different for each record.
• Columns can have more than one value (arrays).
• Records can have a nested structure.

Document stores often use internal notations, which can be processed directly in applications, mostly JSON. JSON documents of course can also be stored as pure text in key-value stores or relational database systems. That would, however, require client-side processing of the structures, which has the disadvantage that the features offered by document stores (such as secondary indexes) are not available.

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