The debate about Single Purpose Database VS Converged/Consolidated Databases: Which approach/architecture is better?

The debate about Single Purpose Database VS Converged/Consolidated Databases: Which approach/architecture is better?

Here is an excellent blog post by Maria Colgan Master Product Manager at Oracle Product Management summarizing the pros and cons of each approach. Here is a quick recap on this topic.

• Single-Purpose Databases / Purpose Built Databases
• Single-Purpose Databases or Purpose Built Databases are architected for a singular or small number of problems/workloads: they are rather simplistic in nature with lesser functionality.
• It is relatively easier to start development against Single-Purpose Databases because of their simplicity.
• Single-Purpose Databases mostly scale well because they do not offer strong consistency guarantees.
• Single-Purpose Databases end up costing significantly more in the medium to long run due to data fragmentation and higher maintenance costs.
• Single-Purpose Best-of-Breed Databases typically creates Vendor Lock-In.
• Single-Purpose Databases are generally used in boutique cases which, typically require higher performance requirements e.g. transaction processing systems.
• Converged/Consolidated Databases 
• Converged/Consolidated Databases cater to all types of data, workloads and development protocols.
• Eliminating data fragmentation also eliminates data contagion in Converged/Consolidated Databases enabling application logic/modules to use and reuse a shared data copy across the organization.
• Converged/Consolidated Databases enable more synergy for data and workloads making development faster.
• Converged/Consolidated Databases make it much simpler for developers to run stuff like Cloud, Autonomous/ML, extended SQL, spatial, blockchain, IoT etc. in one singular consolidated database rather than running them across distributed Single-Purpose databases.
• Converged/Consolidated Databases helps the overall ecosystem to be relatively lesser complex which results in lesser maintenance and development costs in the medium to long run.
• Summary
• The of Single-Purpose Databases or Purpose Built Databases should be well thought out for a very limited/focused set of problems/tasks as, they come at extra maintenance/cost in the medium to long run.

This video by Juan Loaiza & Andrew Sutherland gives a good summary on this debate.

I hope you got a quick overview of the pros and cons of this ongoing debate: Single Purpose Database VS Converged/Consolidated Databases: Which approach/architecture is better?

Cheers.