Adding Spring Data to an existing Spring Boot application

Imagine we have an application brewing. We showed our program manager some preliminary web pages based on the pitch she is hastily putting together. While excited at that, she signals we need to hook them up to some real data.

But instead of swallowing with dread, we smile from ear to ear. Spring Data is the ticket to powerful data management.

Before we can move forward, though, we must make a choice. What data store exactly do we need?

The most common database used today is a relational one (Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and so on). As mentioned in a past SpringOne keynote, relational databases comprise 80% of all projects created on Spring Initializr. Choosing a NoSQL (not only SQL) data store requires careful consideration, but here are three options we can explore:

• Redis is principally built as a key/value data store. It’s very fast and very effective at storing huge amounts of key/value data. On top...