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In the key-value data model, each key is associated with one and only one value. Key-value stores expose three basic APIs:

• GET to fetch the value of a key (for example, GET('name'))
• SET to store the value of a key (for example, SET('name', 'yugabyte'))
• DEL to delete a key and its value (for example, DEL('name'))

With these three simple functionalities, key-value stores have carved themselves a niche in modern infrastructure because of their speed and simplicity.

YugabyteDB provides several advantages when used as a key-value store:

• YugabyteDB internally stores data as a collection of key-value pairs and therefore automatically excels as a key-value store.
• Being distributed by design, YugabyteDB also naturally acts as a distributed key-value store.
• YugabyteDB inherently provides consistency of data because of Raft replication, which is typically not guaranteed by other key-value stores.

Use cases

1. Cache server : The key-value data model is best suited for designing cache servers where the cached data is represented by a key. The cached object could be represented in JSON or Hstore (to have multiple attributes) and parsed by the application.

2. Telephone directory : A telephone directory instantly falls into the key-value model, where the key is the phone number and the value is the name and address of the person to whom the phone number belongs.

3. Session store : A session-oriented application, such as a web application, starts a session when a user logs in, and is active until the user logs out or the session times out. During this period, the application stores all session-related data like profile information, themes, zipcode, geography, and so on, in a fast key-value store.

4. Shopping cart : A user's shopping cart can be represented as a JSON or Hstore and stored under a key (for example, user1.cart). Given the strong consistency and resilience offered by YugabyteDB, the cart information will not be lost even in case of disasters.

Simple scenario

Consider a scenario where you want to store multiple details related to users like id, name, country. For this, you could adopt a simple key-value schema where each attribute is a separate key, such as the following where the key contains both the id and the attribute name while the value is the value of the attribute, like:

user1.name = "John Wick"
user1.country = "USA"
user2.name = "Harry Potter"
user2.country = "UK"

The primary concern with the above schema is that the database will have to do multiple internal lookups to fetch the data for a single user as each attribute will be stored as a different row. To avoid this, you could choose to store the user data in an HStore type, like:

1 : {"name" : "John Wick", "country" : "USA"}
2 : {"name" : "Harry Potter", "country" : "UK"}

Let us go over both schemas.

Cluster setup

• Local
• YB Managed
• YB Anywhere

Attributes as separate rows

Follow the steps below to set up your table.

1. Create the table.

   CREATE TABLE kvstore (
       key VARCHAR,
       value VARCHAR,
       PRIMARY KEY(key)
   );
   

2. Add some data.

   INSERT INTO kvstore VALUES ('user1.name', 'John Wick'), ('user1.country', 'USA'),
                             ('user2.name', 'Harry Potter'), ('user2.country', 'UK');
   

3. If you fetch the rows from the table as,

   SELECT * FROM kvstore;
   

   You will see the output to be:

         key      |    value
   ---------------+--------------
   user2.country | UK
   user1.name    | John Wick
   user1.country | USA
   user2.name    | Harry Potter
   

GET

To get the name of user1, you can execute the following:

-- GET('user1.name')
SELECT value FROM kvstore WHERE key = 'user1.name';

   value
-----------
 John Wick

SET

To store a value for a key, you can do an insert. Because the key could already exist, you should provide an ON CONFLICT UPDATE clause.

INSERT INTO kvstore(key, value) VALUES('user1.name', 'Jack Ryan')
        ON CONFLICT (key) DO
        UPDATE SET value = EXCLUDED.value;

DEL

To delete a key and its value, you can execute a simple DELETE command as follows:

DELETE FROM kvstore WHERE key = 'user1.name';

Attributes as one row

To store multiple attributes associated with a user as one entry, you can use the Hstore type. Follow the steps below to set up your table.

1. Create the HStore extension.

   CREATE EXTENSION hstore;
   

2. Create the table as follows.

   CREATE TABLE kvstore1 (
       id int,
       attributes hstore,
       PRIMARY KEY(id)
   );
   

3. Add some data.

   INSERT INTO kvstore1 VALUES (1, '"name" => "John Wick", "country" => "USA"'),
                               (2, '"name" => "Harry Potter", "country" => "UK"');
   

4. If you fetch the rows from the table as,

   SELECT * FROM kvstore1 ;
   

   You should see the following output.

   id |               attributes
   ----+-----------------------------------------
     1 | "name"=>"John Wick", "country"=>"USA"
     2 | "name"=>"Harry Potter", "country"=>"UK"
   

GET

To get the name of the user with id=1, you can execute:

SELECT attributes->'name' as name FROM kvstore1 WHERE id = 1;

   name
-----------
 John Wick

SET

To store a value for an attribute, you can do an insert. Because the key could already exist, you should provide an ON CONFLICT UPDATE clause.

INSERT INTO kvstore1(id, attributes) VALUES(1, '"name" => "John Malkovich"')
        ON CONFLICT (id) DO
        UPDATE SET attributes = kvstore1.attributes || EXCLUDED.attributes;

If you are sure that an entry for that user already exists, you could just do an update as:

UPDATE kvstore1 SET attributes = attributes || '"name" => "John Malkovich"' WHERE id = 1;

DEL

To delete an attribute and its value, you can execute:

UPDATE kvstore1 SET attributes = delete(attributes, 'name') WHERE id = 1;

Now if you fetch the rows from the table as,

SELECT * FROM kvstore1;

you will notice that the name attribute has been removed for user id=1.

 id |               attributes
----+-----------------------------------------
  1 | "country"=>"USA"
  2 | "name"=>"Harry Potter", "country"=>"UK"

Learn more

• Hstore
• Json