Video produced by Steve Nathans-Kelly
At Data Summit 2018, Jeff Fried, director of product management at InterSystems, considered the value of polyglot persistence versus a multi-model database approach.
Today, relational, columnar, object, XML, and graph databases are flourishing, but many applications need all of these for different capabilities. Promoters of the "polyglot persistence" approach suggest that that one-size-cannot-fit-all and instead focus on integrating multiple data stores.
Yet, the multi-model database is on the rise, and many leading operational DBMSs offer multiple data models. Fried discussed what is practical and whether a multi-model database is desirable.
With polyglot persistence, he noted, the idea is simply to use multiple data stores, picking which data store works for that part of the application, and then gluing it together. Or, if you’re an application developer you will have heard of polyglot applications, which is the equivalent in using multiple languages for an application. “And this dates, at least as a term, back about 12 years." When the rise of NoSQL databases came, also came the idea that there may be different things for different purposes, but then they have to be stitched together.
Almost any time you are doing data integration, even if you're working in data warehouses or connecting data lakes, along with an analytical reporting workload, you are "stitching together" multiple data stores, said Fried.
To access more Data Summit 2018 videos, go to www.dbta.com/DataSummit/2018/videos.aspx.
Many PowerPoint presentations from Data Summit 2018 have been made available for review at www.dbta.com/DataSummit/2018/Presentations.aspx.
Data Summit 2019, presented by DBTA and Big Data Quarterly, is scheduled for May 21-22, 2019, at the Hyatt Regency Boston, with pre-conference workshops on May 20.