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Home/Magazine Archive/September 2022 (Vol. 65, No. 9)/Persistence Programming/Abstract

Practice

Persistence Programming

By Archie L. Cobbs
Communications of the ACM, September 2022, Vol. 65 No. 9, Pages 43-47
10.1145/3546957
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Sisyphus pushing a boulder of binary digits up a hill, illustration — Credit: Getty Images, cutout.pro

Most software applications require persistence programming of some kind—but what exactly is it, and more importantly, are we doing it right?

A few years ago, my team was working on a commercial Java development project for Enhanced 911 (E911) emergency call centers. We were frustrated by trying to meet the data-storage requirements of this project using the traditional model of Java over an SQL database. After some reflection about the particular requirements (and non-requirements) of the project, we took a deep breath and decided to create our own custom persistence layer from scratch. This ended up being a lot of work, but it also gave us a chance to rethink persistence programming in Java.

Comments

David Simmons

September 11, 2022 07:03

This was a good article on optimizing persistent storage for a specific language like Java. One caveat is that the approach can cause problems if you later need to support other languages. At work we use a mix of Java, C#, PHP for different services and they sometimes need to share a database.

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