A Not-only SQL (NoSQL) database is a non-relational database.
It is highly scalable, fault-tolerant and specifically designed to house semi-structured and unstructured data.
They often provides an API-based query interface that can be called from within an application.
They also support query languages other than Structured Query Language (SQL) as SQL was designed to query structured data stored within a relational database.
An examples:
- a NoSQL database that is optimized to store XML files will often use XQuery as the query language.
- a NoSQL database designed to store RDF data will use SPARQL to query the relationships it contains.
