Coined over a decade ago, the term “polyglot persistence” has come to be seen as a shorthand phrase in the database world for using the best tool for the job, or in other words, the right database for the data storage need at hand.
Today, that might mean NoSQL, NewSQL, in-memory databases, and cloud databases—also known as database as a service—approaches. All are increasingly being adopted to address the emerging requirements created by the explosive growth in data volume and variety, and the need to put that data to use as quickly as possible. Social media, the Internet of Things, demands for mobile access and real-time insights are just some of the factors that have increased the pressure on organizations to change how data is managed. And as a result there have never been so many data management choices to deal with it all.
According to “The 2016 Enterprise Data Management Survey,” produced by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., many companies now manage a vast amount of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Close to 10 % of respondents report managing 10PB of data or more, and managing a petabyte of data is increasingly becoming routine.
Still, these are early days for many of the newer database technologies, and existing relational database technologies are still the heavyweights when it comes to managing enterprise data. Newer approaches are being embraced—many of them cloud-based and open source—on-premise, relational database management systems, and enterprise data warehouses still represent the central backbones of the enterprise data management infrastructure, the survey found.
Nonetheless, the time is now to get up to speed on the newer database technologies and start putting them to use. As Joe Caserta, president of Caserta Concepts, noted in his Data Summit 2017 keynote, there is a paradigm shift underway in the way organizations onboard and process data. “You have to evolve or you are going to die, just like any other process in evolution.”
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MongoDB
FINALISTS
Microsoft SQL Server
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