NoSQL Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Emerging World of Polyglot Persistence

Chapter 15. Choosing Your Database

At this point in the book, we’ve covered a lot of the general issues you need to be aware of to make decisions in the new world of polyglot persistence. It’s now time to talk about choosing your databases for future development work. Naturally, we don’t know your particular circumstances, so we can’t give you your answer, nor can we reduce it to a simple set of rules to follow. Furthermore, it’s still early days in the production use of NoSQL systems, so even what we do know is immature—in a couple of years we may well think differently.

We see two broad reasons to consider a NoSQL database: programmer productivity and data access performance. In different cases these forces may complement or contradict each ...