document updated 15 years ago, on Jul 22, 2009
There are various things that view the universe as one giant collection of opaque attribute-value pairs. Though at first glance this seems limiting, it's nonetheless true that a LOT of work gets done under this data model. Such a system provides the programmer with "molecular level" database facilities that are the building-blocks of larger database systems, so this allows the programmer to build a partial database system (but this is only suitable if the programmer is confident it's exactly what they need).