Data persistence has a way of sneaking up on developers. You start out with a simple, straightforward database that can functionally hold the data you're working with and the data you need to work with later. But as your needs change, you start to modify it here and there, until it becomes a brittle tangle of tables and keys and indexes. You need something more dynamic, but you need to retain the ability to retrieve your persistent data. Now, you're miles from where you started, and staring down the possibility of having to adopt a whole new system. That persistent data is fundamental to nearly any operation that utilizes database management systems (DBMS), but while the growth of dynamic data has led to sophisticated and reliable new relational management systems, real-world techniques for optimal data storage and retrieval have sometimes been lost in the shuffle. With that in mind, we've put together a new edition of our comprehensive DZone Guide to Data Persistence.

More than 580 IT professionals responded to our 2016 Data Persistence Survey, and those responses yielded noteworthy results that we've translated into a tool to answer all your persistent data-related questions.

The demographics of the respondents varied somewhat widely, and that variance helped provide a clear picture of the industry:

• 69 percent of respondents use Java as their primary programming language at work
• 68 percent develop primarily web applications
• 66 percent have been IT professionals for more than 10 years
• 45 percent work at companies headquartered in Europe, 27 percent in the United States
• 44 percent work at companies with more than 500 employees, 19 percent with more than 10,000 employees

We've channeled our findings into a comprehensive resource containing persistence strategies, tools for data storage and retrieval, a checklist for choosing the right database, and an analysis of trends in the DBMS space. Among some of the more fascinating kernels of information was the surprise reveal that nearly 22 percent of the respondents didn't know whether their databases were partitioned or not. This means that nearly a quarter of developers can build applications without knowing how their database handles scale. As a result, database administrators have to be able to distribute large amounts of data under flexible read/write conditions, keeping storage abstraction as tight as possible. We also found that Oracle, MySQL and SQL Server are still the go-to servers in the commercial DBMS world, and it's not really even close. In fact, it's been years since the top three servers have faced any real challenge in both production and non-production environments.

Really, though, these findings are just the tip of the iceberg. In this guide, we've included chapters on the impact of fundamental data structures on storage and retrieval, ORM libraries for Android and iOS, how to choose a DBaaS, executive insights into data persistence, and a directory of over 50 solutions (various kinds of DBMS, ORMs, SQL generators, data grids, and more). We've designed this guide with developers in mind. Dealing with data persistence shouldn't be a headache, and these tools should help cut through some of the complexity.

Give it a read and tell us what you think!

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