Polyglot Persistence, is it the future of application persistence?

In yesterday's post John Nunmaker discussed the future of persistence as it related to NoSQL. His thoughts were that application persistence would be hosted and would employ polyglot persistence. In today's post we are going to explore that last piece, polyglot persistence.

In his presentation at WindyCityDB, John P. Wood discusses polyglot persistence, what it is and how does it help?

Key points from the presentation:

• RDBMS is no longer the default choice, but it's not dead either
• We now have several choices in the NoSQL arena. Having choices is great. However, it means we must do the work to validate our tool of choice as the right one for the job. 

So what exactly is polyglot persistence?

The continued or prolonged existence of something using several databases.

Scott Lebnerknight is quoted in the presentation to reinforce this point:

Polyglot Persistence, like polyglot programming, is all about choosing the right persistence option for the task at hand.

One could assume this would be like using Grails for the UI portion of a web application and perhaps Java for other backed processes. So what does this mean? It means you that the default mode of large organizations will be to support multiple data stores.

Some organizations like Facebook and Twitter are already doing this. Specifically in both cases you see these organizations using MySQL, Cassandra and HBase for various aspects of there applications.

As John Wood beautifully summarizes why we do this:

Right tool for the job

Links of the Day - 2010/07/01

Links of the Day for July 1st, 2010

• Notes from a production MongoDB deployment - David Mytton describes his experiences with MongoDB in a production enviroment. Discusses namespace limits, replication, durability and support from 10Gen. David also tells if he would choose MongoDB again.
• Reflections on MongoDB - Brandon Keepers of Collective Idea presents some thoughts about their usage of MongoDB. My favorite quote "MongoDB is not all leprechauns and unicorns. It’s the bleeding edge, and you will bleed."
• Sones releases the first open source edition of their GraphDB
• Migrating to CouchDB with a Focus on Views - John P. Wood provides a case study of his attempt to migrate to CouchDB. John puts it best "We faced several challenges migrating to CouchDB and learned some important lessons along the way. All of those challenges will be addressed here." We will be coming back to this post, in the future, to discuss it in more detail.