Companies are increasingly looking for the right database for the data storage need at hand. 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 continued growth in data volume and variety, and the need to put that data to use as faster than ever before.
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.
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 prior generation of database technology was completely dominated by Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS), which came with widely accepted standards for data modeling (Relational for transactional systems; Dimensional for analytical systems) and for data access (SQL),” said David Teplow, CEO, Integra Technology Consulting, in an interview for Data Summit 2018. “No such standards exist for technologies like Hadoop, HBase, Cassandra, MongoDB, DynamoDB and other NoSQL databases that offer multiple storage models) and numerous access methods. It’s important to understand the differences between the many options and the tradeoffs that come with each.”
Nonetheless, the time is now to get up to speed on the newer database technologies and start putting them to use.
Best Database (Overall)
Microsoft SQL Server
Finalists
MongoDB
Couchbase