NoSQL is not really one specific database type, quite a lot of very different apporaches fall under the label. Starting from Key/Value Stores like redis, over d

NoSQL is not really one specific database type, quite a lot of very different apporaches fall under the label. Starting from Key/Value Stores like redis, over documentbased structures like couchdb and Column-oriented approaches like Google's BigTable and Apaches HBase to graph-Databases like neo4j. And these aren't even all types of NoSQL approaches. Their use depends pretty much entirely on what you'd like to do. Network-Structures are naturally best suited for graphbased databases. For Scaling Issues and really fast access redis seems good (haven't used it) and if you are working on really, really large datasets Hbase combined with hadoop might be worth a look. Here is a small overview presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/chrisbaglieri/non-relational-databases-2143723 http://www.slideshare.net/chrisbaglieri/non-relational-datab...