Choosing Sides in the Database Storage War

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by Mike Johnson Posted on October 29, 2015

In my previous blog, I asked, Are You Ready to Go Fishing in a Data Lake? The use of data lakes has created some complicated choices for data storage, turning the decision-making process into a battleground between storage vendors.

So Many ​Data ​Storage Choices

Before you and your company use a data lake, you have to decide how to store your data. These questions can help start the process:

  • What type of data do we want to store? 
  • How often do we want to access our data—hourly, daily, weekly, next month?  
  • What types of reports do we want to run? 
  • What do we want to do with data stored in the data lake? 
  • Are we depending on our data scientists to figure out what to do with the data now that we have it?

And here’s the kicker: Even with answers to these questions, it can still be overwhelming to figure out which storage solution will work best for you.  As you can see from this diagram from 451 Research, it’s dense:

Data Wars Image 1

How to Choose?

It’s one of the things we’re working on in the industry—how to simplify data storage choices for our customers. One of the things we do is take a typical example of someone writing an application, right? You know that performance is top of mind. They’re going to write this application and connect to one source. But six months down the road, requirements change, and they have to add in another source. Or maybe they have a project that requires something different. As you can imagine, connecting point-to-point to each one of the available sources is a tedious, time-consuming, and expensive thing to ponder. 

You Need a Single ​Data ​Access Point

The key is one unified access point for your data. As you begin a project, what you want to do is think about all the different data sources, and be able to connect to them through one data hub. You want one unified access point that can access anything in the cloud or behind the firewall​. You also want it to be able to be used with any type of BI tool, and ​be really, really fast. That’s what it comes down to.

Mine the data lake with ease

There’s an easy way to get to the data you need. Progress DataDirect Cloud gives you fast, easy and unified SQL/OData access to data in the cloud and behind your firewall.                                                                                                                 

Database Wars Image 2

Mine the Data Lake with Ease – Let DataDirect Cloud Be Your Hub                                                                                                                              
Fastest in the Industry

The drivers my team and I build here at Progress® DataDirect® are designed to be the fastest in the industry, and we stand behind that claim with award winning technical support. When you find performance degradation issues in our software, we treat them like defects because we understand how important speed is to your business. You can pick up a free trial today and try it out for yourself, or watch a replay of my webinar, “Industry Insight: Optimizing Your Data for Better Performance.” Don’t forget to check back for the next installment of this series!

Click here for free trials of DataDirect Cloud Platform


Mike Johnson
Mike Johnson
Mike is a proven leader with over 20 years of experience in developing commercial software for the industry leader in standards-based data access software. He has extensive experience in all aspects of commercial software development including requirements analysis, developing functional requirements, developing and mentoring individuals, staffing, budgeting, product development, quality assurance, training and customer communication. Mike has progressed in his career in large part from his strong work ethic and a “do whatever it takes” attitude.
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