In a traditional RDBMS, the basic operations are reads and writes. Reads may be scaled by replicating data to multiple machines, thus load-balancing read requests. However, this affects writes because data consistency must be maintained. Writes only may be scaled by partitioning the data. This affects reads, as distributed joins are usually slow and hard to implement. Additionally, to maintain ACID properties, databases must lock data. This means that when one user opens a data item, no other user should be able to make changes to the same item. This restriction has serious implications on performance.
NoSQL databases are focused on particular classes of problems - from being more flexible about stored data (document stores), to targeting use cases, like relationships (graph databases) and aggregating data (column databases) or just simplifying the idea of a database down to something that stores a value (key/value stores).
NoSQL databases offer the advantages of rapid scalability, much better performance, and a simpler structure compared to RDBMSs. However, they also suffer from being a relatively new and unproven technology, and they cannot provide RDBMS' rich reporting and analytical functionality.
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