Confront the Challenge of Choosing the Right Enterprise Database Systems

When it comes to database administration, enterprise decision-makers understanding largely differ. With too many DBMS choices and various strategies in database administration, this question of choice of the database becomes even more complicated. A decade back, when someone thought of adopting an enterprise database, there was only one choice as relational SQL DBs. However, now things have changed largely. You can find many new generation databases, too, as NoSQL and NewSQL, which had become largely popular lately.

As the choice became more confusing, we will discuss a few fundamental things to know and note while planning to acquire an enterprise DB. Both decision-makers and database administrators need to have a fair understanding of the enterprise goals against the available features in various databases to make an appropriate decision. So, further, we will discuss some essential tips to note.

Your data volume

As of late, one important consideration while thinking of an enterprise database is the storage of data. As data sources are ever-increasing from pos stations to surveillance camera info, anything related to customer touchpoints is now becoming valuable data to enterprises. Along with these, internal info like employee and stakeholder details, historical data related to business, everything needs to go into an enterprise database for storage. A good database must store and process all this information to be considered a viable DBMS for any enterprise.

Structure of data

Along with data volume, which is ever-increasing, the structure of data is also changing largely. As we have seen above, the traditional relational SQL DBs are meant to handle structured data. In contrast, many of the latest data available from various sources are either semi-structured or unstructured. Big data applications can effectively process any type of data for analytical purposes, but the requirement is for a mighty database to backup such applications. NoSQL has proved out to be much efficient in handling structure-less data, and the latest generation NewSQL DBs too can do this job well. There are many SQL databases too now getting revamped to meet the objective of handling various data.

The objective of enterprise databases

As we discussed, the requirement of a database differs from organization to organization, and it is important to consider the enterprise goals to choose an appropriate DB. For some organizations, a database’s primary objective is to store their limited volume of data to be queried and retrieve the needed information from time to time. Proper upkeep of the structured data and effective querying capabilities are the requirements here, which can be achieved through a strong SQL DB as MySQL or MS SQL. 

In some other cases, as in a research organization, the goal may be to compile various random data inputs from different sources and analyze the same for identifying trends or getting any actionable insight from it. In such cases, the database objective also changes to the same. You need to log for any database engine that will support machine learning and big data applications for this purpose. For those who cannot analyze the requirements in light of the enterprise’s primary objectives, it is recommended to get assistance from expert consultants like RemoteDBA, who can offer you support

It is not just an SQL vs. NoSQL choice.

You may be finding many articles discussing the pros and cons of SQL vs. NoSQL DBs. While these can offer you some insight into the differences and benefits of one against the other, most of these article writers tend to miss out on some major factors for the yes-or-no decision-makers to take up. As we have discussed above, the primary need is to select a database that supports the right structure of your data, size of data or data volume, and the speed and performance requirements of the applications.

As in the case of SQL and NoSQL, the structure of data focuses primarily on the need to store or retrieve the data. Modern-day applications deal with data in various formats. So the selection of the right database will include picking the right data structure for storage and retrieval of more important data. If you select the right data structure for your enterprise data, then your application may require further tweaks in the development efforts to work around such issues and may not be able to scale up or down as needed.

The data size is about the quantity of your data, which needed to be stored and retrieved from your database. The database’s speed and scale address the time taken for a database to cater effectively to the incoming reads and writes of the applications. Some databases are custom designed to optimize the read-heavy applications while some other focus primarily on write-heavy applications. The selection of the right database will help you handle the I/O needs of the apps and go a long way to bringing up a scalable architecture.

Data modeling will come into help

Doing proper data modeling will help you map the features of your applications effectively into the data structure you need to implement. Starting from the fundamental conceptual model, you can start identifying the nature of data entities, related attributes, and the entity relationships which you may need to process. As you need to go through this tiresome process, it will further become much clearer that the data types and structures you have to implement. You can further ruse these structural considerations to select the apt category database, which can serve your applications’ needs at best. 

In terms of proper data modeling, you can consider whether you need to have a relational, document-oriented, key-value, column-oriented, or graph store data structure to see which one is apt for you. Each of these is meant to serve a specific purpose, which you need to evaluate and identify which one matches your need the best. If you are uncertain about this talk to professionals and they can guide you the best way. You must be sure that it will work for your business effortlessly. 

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Christophe Rude
Christophe Rude
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