BACKGROUND

Relational databases, which model data as rows and columns in a series of tables, have long been a popular form of data organization and storage. However, service provider networks and other applications have made it increasingly easy for developers to use a wide variety of other types of data stores across their software applications and systems. Examples of such alternative data store types include object storage services (which can store files of virtually any file type and format), non-relational databases, data warehouses, and the like. While relational databases can provide optimal storage and querying performance in some contexts, the characteristics of other such data stores can improve scalability and performance for other use cases. The ability to readily integrate different types of data stores into software applications and systems has led to an increasing use of multiple types of data stores depending on the particular performance, durability and availability, scalability, security, and other considerations related to each subset of data to be stored and used by an application.

