Editor’s Note: The following is an article written for and published in DZone’s 2024 Trend Report, Database Systems: Modernization for Data-Driven Architectures.

Modern database practices enhance performance, scalability, and flexibility while ensuring data integrity, consistency, and security. Some key practices include leveraging distributed databases for scalability and reliability, using cloud databases for on-demand scalability and maintenance, and implementing NoSQL databases for handling unstructured data. Additionally, data lakes store vast amounts of raw data for advanced analytics, and in-memory databases speed up data retrieval by storing data in main memory. The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming database development and maintenance by automating complex tasks, enhancing efficiency, and ensuring system robustness.