Tablestore is a cost-effective table-based serverless storage service that can be used to store large volumes of structured data. Tablestore allows you to query and retrieve online data within milliseconds and perform multi-dimensional analysis on stored data. Tablestore is suitable for scenarios such as billing, instant messaging (IM), IoT, Internet of Vehicles (IoV), risk control, and intelligent recommendation. Tablestore provides a deeply optimized all-in-one storage solution for IoT applications. Tablestore features a vastly different data model and technical implementation than traditional relational database services such as MySQL and SQL Server.
Tablestore and traditional database services have the following differences:
You need to deploy and maintain the software and hardware of traditional database services. In comparison, you only need to activate Tablestore and pay for the actual resources that you use in Tablestore, such as storage resources and read/write capacity units (CUs).
Traditional database services provide a variety of features such as view, indexing, and transaction. On top of that, Tablestore provides advanced features such as global secondary index, local secondary index, search index, and local transaction, with better scalability to support large amounts of data (several hundred TBs) and numbers of concurrent requests (100,000 QPS per table).
Traditional database services use SQL statements. Tablestore provides standard HTTP RESTful APIs and SDKs in multiple languages.
Traditional database services require strict schemas. Tablestore does not use the tabular schema of rows and columns that are found in most traditional database systems. Instead, Tablestore uses a storage model that is optimized for the specific requirements of the type of data being stored. Columns in each row can be different. You can add or remove attribute columns.