Introduction to Reactive Data Store

Background

Nobody builds an application without data. It’s as simple as that. Maybe today, we aren’t integrating with that 3rd-party service, or we aren’t securing our pages and API. Maybe we aren’t connecting to a message broker. But if we haven’t hooked up to a database to store and retrieve data, we don’t have a real demo. Data is the lifeblood of applications, and Spring Boot’s top-notch support for Spring Data makes data management not only achievable, but fun.

Why we use reactive data store

Before we start storing things in a database, we must first understand a key requirement of reactive programming. Everything should be reactive. If we build our web controllers and service layer to be reactive, and then call into a blocking database, we have a problem. The thread we’re using could freeze as it waits for a response. Also, because Reactor-based applications don’t have many threads, our whole application could freeze as we wait for the database server to answer our request.