Why do we keep jumping from one storage engine to another? Can’t we make up our minds already and settle with the “best” storage engine that meets our needs?

In short, No.

A common misconception is the belief that all storage engines are created equal, all designed to simply “store stuff” and provide fast access to your data. Unless your application performs one clearly defined simple task, it is a dire mistake to expect a single storage engine will effectively fulfill all of your data warehousing and processing needs.

I don’t think I need to say that I’m a proponent of polyglot persistence. And that I believe in Unix tools philosophy. But while adding more components to your system, you should realize that such a system complexity is “exploding” and so will operational costs grow too (nb: do you remember why Twitter started to into using Cassandra?) . Not to mention that the more components your system has the more attention and care must be invested figuring out critical aspects like overall system availability, latency, throughput, and consistency.

Original title and link: Why Redis? And Memcached, Cassandra, Lucene, ElasticSearch (NoSQL databases © myNoSQL)

via: http://www.softwareprojects.com/resources/programming/t-redis-a-persistent-key-value-store-2021.html