"No substance" seems a bit harsh.

They mostly seem a tarted up associative array, sure, but a key-value store is a thing.

But don't you prefer your key value stores to be wearing red lipstick and a pushup bra?

> but a key-value store is a thing

DynamoDB underpins much of AWS which in turn underpins a ridiculous number of web services.

So definitely more than just a thing.

A naturally distributed key/value store. NoSQL wasn't a product, it was a radical rethinking of the balance between what we wanted and what we needed. Turns out some absolute necessities of using a RDBMS or even using SQL are not that important, and relaxing those actually-not-requirements allows massive scalability, something we desperately needed, or some evolved data structures and computation, like what redis provides.

Hype with no substance? Hold on ;)

I know it hurts, but remember that we were still writing XML way too often in 2013. Document stores were purpose-built for a thing we needed. And the execs bought in, to boot.

At the time, it was very convenient to shove JSON and similar in an indexable and aggregate-able database. I implemented a lot of very very large-scale code analytics via mongodb--about 10 years ago.

There wasn't really support for unstructured types in mysql or postgres or oracle without some additional transformation pipelines or db extensions back then. We usually just wrote stupidly complicated SQL schemas that took up our whole conference room, and only that one stressed-out guy really understood.

So it was neat. I would choose something better today.