“The right tool for the right job.” If such wisdom holds true anywhere, it certainly holds true with the choice of database a developer picks for a given application. Document databases, one of the family of data products collectively referred to as “NoSQL,” are for developers who want to focus on their application rather than the database technology.
With a document database, data is not stored in tables with distinct column types. Instead, it is stored in freeform “documents” with any number of fields and any number of nested structures. Such documents are typically represented as JSON, and updated either by way of APIs or by sending JSON to a REST endpoint. Most every modern programming language supports JSON and REST, so working with a document database feels more like working natively with those data structures than working with a traditional database.
