NOSQL databases were developed to address the limitations of relational database management systems (RDBMS) in handling large volumes of data and queries. RDBMS are suitable for vertical scaling but cannot scale horizontally to support billions of queries per day. NOSQL databases sacrifice consistency to achieve high availability and horizontal scaling by following the BASE model instead of ACID. They allow data to be basically available, in a soft or eventually consistent state to better support large, distributed systems.