Polyglot persistence

Polyglot persistence is the concept of using different data storage technologies to handle different data storage needs within a given enterprise and even software application. Polyglot programming, a term coined by Neal Ford in 2006, expresses the idea that computer applications should be written in a mix of different programming languages, in order to take advantage of the fact that different languages are suitable for tackling different problems. Complex applications combine different types of problems, so picking the right language for each job may be more productive than trying to solve all aspects of the problem using a single language. This same concept can be applied to databases, that an application can communicate with different databases, using each for what it is best at to achieve an end goal, hence the term polyglot persistence.

There are numerous databases available to solve different problems. Using a single database to satisfy all of a program's requirements can result in a non-performant, "jack of all trades, master of none" solution. Relational databases, for example, are good at enforcing relationships that exist between various data tables. To discover a relationship or to find data from different tables that belong to the same object, an SQL join operation can be used. This might work when the data is smaller in size, but becomes problematic when the data involved grows larger. A graph database might solve the problem of relationships in case of Big Data, but it might not solve the problem of database transactions, which are provided by RDBM systems. Instead, a NoSQL document database might be used to store unstructured data for that particular part of the problem. Thus different problems are solved by different database systems, all within the same application.