How do NoSQL databases work? Simply Explained!

NoSQL databases power some of the biggest sites. They're fast and super scalable but how do they work?

Behind-the-scenes, they use a keyspace to distribute your data across multiple servers or partitions. This allows them to scale horizontally across many thousand servers.

NoSQL databases can operate in multiple modes: as key-value store, document store or wide column store.

You can run your own NoSQL database with software like Cassandra, CouchDB, MongoDB or Scylla. You can also use a cloud version like AWS DynamoDB, Google Cloud BigTable or Azure CosmosDB.