A Smart Polyglot Solution for Big Data in Healthcare

Healthcare information systems (HISs) are multifarious in nature. They are thus best implemented using multiple data stores because one database won´t fulfill all the storage requirements of such complex applications. The amalgamation of different databases within an application is known as polyglot persistence. To achieve a polyglot-persistent solution, different database types must available. As late as 2005, relational databases ruled as the de facto databases, but their reign has been challenged by nonrelational databases, known as NoSQL data stores, making polyglot persistence possible. Applications´ persistence needs are progressing from mostly relational to a mixture of data stores. For example, various HIS modules should use different data stores to model data closer to its semantic usage. The authors´ PolyglotHIS solution lets managers easily venture into polyglot-persistent software because all data stores are free and open source. Although polyglot persistence generates overhead from dealing with multiple data stores, the benefits are worth every penny. With PolyglotHIS, overhead in terms of latency caused by the presence of multiple layers is so small that it becomes negligible as the dataset increases.