The Rise of Operational Analytics

Chapter 5. Selecting the Right Database for the Job

The Road Ahead

Given the explosive demands of todays’ data-rich ecosystems, it is even more critical for businesses to look at the road ahead. This strategy of seeing the forest for the trees enables keen practitioners to observe the micro- and macro-trends that influence technology across industries, and it gives them a preemptive head start against the competition. It is common to have a roadmap that identifies the next one to three years in terms of broad architectural decisions, that is revised as needed but can be used as a blueprint for company-wide initiatives.

Given the many features and requirements to consider, as well as the sometimes nearly ideological level of conviction that people develop as to the correct approach, selecting the right tools for the data-driven company is a complex undertaking. Data and system architects must be aware of the myriad frameworks and technologies that can be used to provide critical data platform capabilities. These include distributed cluster computing frameworks, fault-tolerant event stream processing platforms, various elastic storage solutions, and, finally, knowledge and understanding of numerous database categories.

In the next section we break down the capabilities available across the common database categories and highlight the advantages of NewSQL.

Database Selection Criteria

Deciding which database technology to adopt is use-case driven, but as the capabilities matrix ...