Patent attributes
Techniques are described for monitoring and enabling access to information about key access patterns for nonrelational database tables managed by a nonrelational database service of a service provider network. Storage nodes store data as key-value pairs (or key-document pairs), where the records or documents of a database are addressed by a unique key for each record. The storage nodes over time receive requests to perform various operations (for example, to get, put, update, or delete data in a table) associated with records stored by the storage nodes. The storage nodes collect information indicating a frequency with which such requests are received for each key for which a storage node is responsible. This frequency information for each key can be normalized relative to a maximum frequency supported by the storage nodes to obtain an access frequency score, where the maximum frequency indicates a frequency at which additional requests to the storage node may be throttled.