Amazon DocumentDB vs. Amazon SimpleDB vs. NoSQL vs. SQL Comparison Chart

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. As a document database, Amazon DocumentDB makes it easy to store, query, and index JSON data. Amazon DocumentDB is a non-relational database service designed from the ground-up to give you the performance, scalability, and availability you need when operating mission-critical MongoDB workloads at scale. In Amazon DocumentDB, the storage and compute are decoupled, allowing each to scale independently, and you can increase the read capacity to millions of requests per second by adding up to 15 low latency read replicas in minutes, regardless of the size of your data. Amazon DocumentDB is designed for 99.99% availability and replicates six copies of your data across three AWS Availability Zones (AZs).

NoSQL is a domain-specific programming language used for accessing, managing, and manipulating non-tabular databases. A NoSQL (originally referring to "non-SQL" or "non-relational") database provides a mechanism for storage and retrieval of data that is modeled in means other than the tabular relations used in relational databases. Such databases have existed since the late 1960s, but the name "NoSQL" was only coined in the early 21st century, triggered by the needs of Web 2.0 companies. NoSQL databases are increasingly used in big data and real-time web applications.NoSQL systems are also sometimes called Not only SQL to emphasize that they may support SQL-like query languages or sit alongside SQL databases in polyglot-persistent architectures. Many NoSQL stores compromise consistency (in the sense of the CAP theorem) in favor of availability, partition tolerance, and speed. Barriers to the greater adoption of NoSQL stores include the use of low-level query languages.