Over the past several years, open source technology adoption has steadily increased in the enterprise space.
Because of the impact it can have on the business, choosing the right open source technology—specifically a database—is a critical decision that shouldn’t be taken lightly.
The choice can seem overwhelming. Is it best to use a relational database like MySQL or PostgreSQL, or should you consider NoRelational databases such as MongoDB or Apache Cassandra?
Choose incorrectly, and you might end up with performance issues once you deploy it into production; issues not always identifiable in your development environment.
DBTA recently held a webinar with John Schulz, principal consultant, Pythian; Pedro Vidigal, director of customer service delivery, OSDB Pythian; and Gabriel Ciciliani, internal principal consultant, Pythian, who discussed choosing the right open source database.
Everyone wants to know what the best way to store data is, what the best technology is, and what the best way to use that technology is, according to Vidigal.
Technology choices matter based on:
- What your data looks like
- What you want to do with it
- Where and how you store it
Choosing the right database technology from the beginning will avoid painful tech migrations later, because of unconsidered limitations, said Vidigal, Schulz, and Ciclilani.
Open source RDBMs like Postgres or MySQL are fully ACID compliant although data consistency and safety always comes at expenses of performance.
More “relaxed” (from a consistency standpoint) database engines like Cassandra and, up to a point, MongoDB, were built with horizontal scaling in mind.
Once a database engine is chosen, play by its rules. Pushing data schemas and practices from engines in a different category will probably end up hindering development and hurting performance.
An archived on-demand replay of this webinar is available here.