Abstract—With the current emphasis on “Big Data”, NoSQL
databases have surged in popularity. These databases are claimed
to perform better than SQL databases. In this paper we aim to
independently investigate the performance of some NoSQL and
SQL databases in the light of key-value stores. We compare
read, write, delete, and instantiate operations on key-value
stores implemented by NoSQL and SQL databases. Besides, we
also investigate an additional operation: iterating through all
keys. An abstract key-value pair framework supporting these
basic operations is designed and implemented using all the
databases tested. Experimental results measure the timing of
these operations and we summarize our findings of how the
databases stack up against each other. Our results show that
not all NoSQL databases perform better than SQL databases.
Some are much worse. And for each database, the performance
varies with each operation. Some are slow to instantiate, but fast
to read, write, and delete. Others are fast to instantiate but slow
on the other operations. And there is little correlation between
performance and the data model each database uses.