Choosing the Right Engine and Hybrid Architectures
Gabor Koos · Apress eBooks · 2026
The preceding chapters examined the internal architectures of specialized database engines. We've come a long way from the foundations of SQL and NoSQL, through columnar stores, lakehouse formats, event-stream systems, time-series engines, probabilistic structures, vector indexes, graph databases, and geospatial engines. Each chapter described the architectural decisions that make these engines fast at their specialty: what they store differently, what they compute differently, and what they sacrifice to achieve that performance. The question that follows naturally from all nine is: when should you actually use one?