You are tasked with developing a real-time chat application where low latency and high availability are critical. Which type of database would be the most suitable, and what considerations should you have in mind regarding data consistency and partitioning?

For a real-time chat application, a NoSQL database would be most suitable due to its ability to handle high concurrency and unstructured data. Considerations for data consistency would involve choosing an appropriate consistency model, like eventual consistency, and partitioning data for scalability and low latency.