PostgreSQL

Lately I’ve built a few apps that have relational data. Instead of trying to shoehorn that data into a NoSQL model I decided to use the awesome Heroku Postgres service but I didn’t want to lose out on the Reactiveness that most of the NoSQL data stores support. I discovered ScalikeJDBC-Async which uses postgresql-async, a Reactive (non-blocking), JDBC-ish, Postgres driver. With those libraries I was able to keep my data relational and my app Reactive all the way down. Lets walk through how to do it in a Play Framework app. (TL;DR: Jump to the the full source.)

There are many benefits to schema-less NoSQL datastores, but there are always trade-offs. The primary gift the NoSQL movement has given us is the variety of options we now have for data persistence. With NoSQL we no longer must try to shoehorn everything into a relational model. Now the challenge is in deciding which persistence model fits best with each domain in a system and then combining those models in a cohesive way. The general term to describe this is [Polyglot Persistence][1] and there are many ways to accomplish it. Lets walk through how you can combine a regular SQL model with a key-value NoSQL model using Java, Spring, Hibernate, and PostgreSQL.