Tencent builds one NoSQL database to rule all data models

Chinese web giant Tencent has revealed it created a NoSQL database that it believes can handle multiple data models more elegantly than other attempts to do so, and has used it to consolidate its database fleet and improve resource utilization.

The existence of the database – named X-Stor – was recently revealed in a paper [PDF] published in the Proceedings of the Very Large Data Base Endowment, the journal of the non-profit organization that exists to promote and exchange scholarly work on databases and related fields.

The paper opens with observations that NoSQL databases are generally built to handle certain data models. Tencent admits it ran several of them to power its fleet of products – social networks, video streaming services, online games, and a public cloud – that collectively serve more than a billion active users.

Titled "X-Stor: A Cloud-native NoSQL Database Service with Multi-model Support", the paper reveals Tencent used graph databases to store info about user relationships for its social networks, wide-column stores to hold user profiles, document series databases to power its advertising operations, and time-series databases to record user behavior data.

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