In this contributed article, Alex Williams, Writer/Researcher at Hosting Data UK, discusses document-oriented databases (also called: aggregate databases, document databases or document stores) and how they place each record, and its associative data, inside single documents. This database type is a subset of the NoSQL umbrella, which refers to the growing list of popular database management systems that use ‘non-relational’ models — i.e. databases that don’t rely on Structured Query Language, SQL.