IB Computer Science Topic A3.4.1: Different Types of Databases as Approaches to Storing Data Key Definitions

A database hosted and run on a provider's remote servers rather than on hardware the organisation owns. The provider supplies capacity on demand and handles backups, patching, security and maintenance.

A database that holds its working data in RAM rather than on disk, so reads and writes avoid the slowest step in the storage hierarchy. The contents are lost when power is lost unless a disk log or non-volatile memory is used.

A database that stores data without a fixed relational schema, so records in the same collection can carry different fields. The main families are document stores, key-value stores, column-family stores and graph databases.

A database that stores geometry such as points, lines and polygons as a data type and indexes rows by position. It answers queries about distance, overlap and containment directly.