Wide-column, column-oriented and column-family databases belong to the NoSQL family of databases built to store and query massive amounts of data, aka BigData.

They are highly available and scalable, built to work in a distributed environment. Most of the wide-column databases do not support joins to scale linearly when it comes to read and write performance.

Some of the popular wide-column stores are Google Bigtable, Apache Cassandra, HBase, etc.

Before I plunge into the topic, let me give you a little heads up on the common data storage models.