The world of scalable databases is not a simple one. They come in every race, creed, and color. Rick Cattell has brought some harmony to that world by publishing High Performance Scalable Data Stores, a nicely detailed one stop shop paper comparing scalable databases soley on the content of their character. Ironically, the first step in that evaluation is dividing the world into four groups:
Key-value stores: Redis, Scalaris, Voldmort, and Riak.
Document stores: Couch DB, MongoDB, and SimpleDB.
Record stores: BigTable, HBase, HyperTable, and Cassandra.
Scalable RDBMSs: MySQL Cluster, ScaleDB, Drizzle, and VoltDB.
The paper describes each system and then compares them on the dimensions of Concurrency Control, Data Storage Replication, Transaction Model, General Comments, Maturity, K-hits, License Language.