Reactive Programming and Relational Databases

<p>Imperative code eats threads at the pace of incoming requests while <a href="https://a16z.com/2016/08/20/why-software-is-eating-the-world/">Software is eating the world</a>. This post discusses the assumptions for reactive programming on the JVM and what this means for integrations – in particular, relational databases.</p><p>The motivation to come up with a post is <a href="https://trends.google.de/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&amp;q=reactive%20java">the constant increase in reactive programming adoption</a> while some major building blocks are not yet available – in particular, the question: What about relational databases?</p><h2><a href="#what-is-reactive-programming" class="anchor" name="what-is-reactive-programming"></a>What is Reactive Programming</h2><p>There are a lot of answers about what Reactive Programming is and how this compares to <a href="https://www.reactivemanifesto.org/">Reactive Systems</a>. I see Reactive Programming as a programming model that facilitates scalability and stability by creating event-driven non-blocking functional pipelines that react to availability and processability of resources. Deferred execution, <a href="https://projectreactor.io/docs/core/release/reference/#schedulers">concurrency and asynchronicity</a> are only a consequence of the underlying programming model.</p>