A hierarchical databases is not a key/value store: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_model Though you a

A hierarchical databases is not a key/value store: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_model Though you are right that the reason RDBMS became the norm has a lot to do with working with the data (analyzing to use your word). A key/value store is effectively just an associative array, while damn useful for certain things, I am hesitant to call that a DBMS.