"What is NoSQL (technically speaking)? The names of these projects are as diverse as they are whimsical: Hadoop, Voldemort, Dynomite, and others. But they are generally unified by a few things, including: Don't call them databases. Amazon.com's CTO, Werner Vogels, refers to the company's influential Dynamo system as a "highly available key-value store." Google calls its BigTable, the other role model for many NoSQL adherents, a "distributed storage system for managing structured data." They can blow through enormous amounts of data." - xero