In 2006, Neal Ford coined the term polyglot programming, to express the idea that applications should be written in a mix of languages to take advantage of the fact that different languages are suitable for tackling different problems. Complex applications combine different types of problems, so picking the right language for each job may be more productive than trying to fit all aspects into a single language.

Similarly, when working on an e-commerce business problem, using a data store for the shopping cart which is highly available and can scale is important, but the same data store cannot help you find products bought by the customers’ friends—which is a totally different question. We use the term polyglot persistence to define this hybrid approach to persistence.