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Software Engineering vocabulary · Databases and Persistence

Key-value store

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounCommon term

In software engineering, key-value store means: The simplest kind of NoSQL database, which saves each value under a unique key and finds it again very quickly by that key.

In Turkish: anahtar-değer deposu, anahtar-değer veritabanı

How it is used

Redis, Memcached, etcd and Amazon DynamoDB are typical examples. Key-value stores are used for caches, user sessions, counters, feature flags and rate limits. You 'get' and 'set' keys and often give them an expiry time (TTL).

Example sentences

  1. Session data lives in a key-value store, so any web server can read it.

  2. A key-value store is fast, but you can't run complex queries on it.

Common collocations

  • key-value store
  • key-value pair
  • set a key
  • key expiry
  • TTL
  • NoSQLA broad group of databases that do not use the classic table-and-SQL model, storing data as documents, key-value pairs, wide columns or graphs instead.
  • in-memory databaseA database that keeps its data mainly in RAM rather than on disk, so reads and writes are extremely fast.
  • cacheA place where copies of files or data are kept for a while so they can be served again faster, for example in the browser, on a CDN or on the server.
  • document databaseA NoSQL database that stores each item as a self-contained document, usually in a JSON-like format, so related data can be kept together without fixed tables.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Databases and Persistence

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