For the last 30 years, a deluge of transformative trends has continually remade and accelerated the database industry—and changed the very nature of the databases in your organization’s technology stack. From relatively staid mainframe programs only handling carefully constructed data to modern microservices architectures working with a wide variety of unstructured data, database technology continues to morph and leverage new technologies, tackle ever harder problems, and power even more mission-critical use cases.
To fully understand what’s happening in the database world right now (and how it affects your technology choices), it’s important to work through the impact of these trends. Today’s databases face unprecedented challenges. They must work with mountains of disparate data, return results in the blink of an eye, and cope with hugely complex technology environments, all while remaining easy to work with and highly available. While many databases exist that have just one or even a few of these critical features, having all nine is vital to successfully manage the challenges they are facing today.