- flexible schema, add or remove columns with ease
 
- great for sparse data
 
- horizontally scalable
 
- not ACID compliant
 
- can store any type of data in one place
 
- great when transactional data is not important, but ease of fetching complex data structures is required
 
Types
- Key-value stores
- great for fetching key-value pairs efficiently -
 
- Dynamo, Redis, …
 
 
- Document databases
- documents with different structures grouped into collections
 
- MongoDB, CouchDB, …
 
 
- Wide-Column databases
2. Casandra, HBase,  …
 
- Graph databases
- entities are nodes with properties, edges connect entities based on relationships
 
- Neo4J, InfiniteGraph, …