Given an overall systems architecture or infrastructure which gets the “IoT” box ticket, the will probably be a place where data transfer and size will come into account, for instance if constrained devices are using a potentially unreliable or expensive connection, such as a cellular data connection. For instance, an enbedded monitoring device which serves the purpose of delivering real-time telemetry to the core system of a car manufacturer will quickly come to a point where JSON-Encoding might exceed the computing power required for the actual job.

During the evaluation period of two new projects with an expected lifespan of 10 years, free from any legacy constraints, I recently had to decide on a method to provide data persistency. Starting from scratch in 2015 prompts the architect with quite a lot of interesting solutions, especially because the more and more mature solutions which are not strictly pursuing the Relational Database approach. In this article I will summarize my personal “history” of how I dealt with persistency and which way I am going to choose.