Alice LaPlante - Developing Modern Applications with a Converged Database

by Alice LaPlante

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978-1-098-10735-2

[LSI]

The mantra has changed. Its no longer, every business is a software businessas attributed to Watts S. Humphrey, the so-called father of quality in software, and echoed by any number of tech leaders. That attitude is so last decade.

Today, every business wants to be a data business. It is generally accepted today that organizations that realize and pursue this vision will accelerate ahead of their competitors, and remain ahead, especially in uncertain markets.

But according to the 2021 executive survey on corporate data initiatives from NewVantage Partners:

• Only 48.5% of businesses are currently driving innovation with data.

• Only 39.3% are managing data as a business asset.

• Only 30% have a well-articulated data strategy for their company .

• Only 24.4% have forged a data culture.

• Only 24% have created a data-driven organization.

Deloitte found much the same thing when surveying executives from large enterprises in July 2019. Although 76% said their data analytics skills had matured over the previous 12 months, the majority of executives were still using traditional tools like spreadsheets (62%) and business intelligence (BI) software (58%) to analyze data.

Additionally, more than 6 in 10 (64%) organizations in the Deloitte study rely solely on structured data from internal systems. By doing this, they are missing insights they could be getting from unstructured data like email, social media, images, and audio files. This unstructured data provides much deeper insight into events, actions, and trends that have the power to affect your business. A point in fact: Deloitte found that companies including unstructured data in their analyses were 24% more likely to meet or beat business goals.

For todays business, just possessing datastructured or unstructuredisnt the goal. Its having data-driven applications that can make sense of this data that matters. But incorporating unstructured data is an ongoing challenge. It either has to be converted into a schema recognized by a traditional databasean extra, time-consuming stepor stored in a specialty database. For example, if youre building a fraud-protection payment system for storing relational data, you might need additional blockchain and graph analytics integrated with it to fight fraud on a real-time basis.

In this report, we explain why developing data-driven apps with a single data platform potentially makes more sense than cobbling together numerous specialty databases. We discuss how you can use the latest techniques in software architecturesuch as microservices, event streaming, REST (representational state transfer) APIs, and SaaS (software as a service) modelsby taking advantage of the synergistic data technologies within a converged database, and that you can even analyze unstructured data such as graph, spatial, or JSON (JavaScript object notation) data without having to convert it. By providing the perspectives and examples of real-world practitioners from a variety of verticals, we will demonstrate how a converged database can streamline data management and ultimately allow businesses to achieve a competitive edge.