Categories of Databases — A Primer

Categories here means Type, Class.

This is not a guide for choosing which Database you need. This is a guide for you to choose which Category of Database you need. Before choosing a Database you should know which category of Database you have to choose from.

Why should you care?

• Knowing a category of Database itself tells you a lot about the guarantees that Database provide.
• Knowing a category can help you remember and choose Databases for your projects, which will help you graduate to next level of your Software development career.

Remember there is no clear distinction for most database in which category it belongs to. Each Database can fall under many categories. Ex — Redis is both a Key-Value and In-Memory Database.

Also there is no clear distinction between Categories too. Ex — Key-Value and Wide-column falls under No-SQL . But like everything else there are exceptions both inside and outside.

You must know about the two most popular category Relational/SQL and No-SQL Databases. But there are a lot of categories along with these two.

Let’s get started.

Categories of Databases

1. Relational Databases
2. NoSQL Databases
3. Key-Value Databases
4. Column Oriented Databases
5. Wide Column / Extensible Record Stores / Column-Family Databases
6. Object Oriented Databases
7. Document Oriented Databases / Document Stores
8. Hierarchical Databases / Graph Databases
9. Network Databases
10. Time-Series Databases
11. In-Memory Databases
12. Cloud Databases / Online Databases / Managed Databases
13. Object Storage
14. NewSQL Databases
15. Multi-Model Databases
16. Semantic RDF Graph Databases
17. Ledger Databases

References

Database of Databases