Neal Ford introduced the, somewhat similar, term polyglot programming in 2006. He used it to illustrate the fact that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution and advocated using multiple programming languages that were more suitable for certain problems.

In the parallel world of data, any business that wants to remain competitive needs to adapt a range of technologies that allows it to solve the problems in a minimal time, thus minimizing the costs.

Storing transactional data in Hadoop files is possible, but makes little sense. On the other hand, processing petabytes of Internet logs using a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) would also be ill-advised. These tools were designed to tackle specific types of tasks; even though they can be co-opted to solve other problems, the cost of adapting the tools to do so would be enormous. It is a virtual equivalent of trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.

For example, consider a company that sells musical...