Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
FOR EXAMPLE
Choosing an Appropriate Deployment Model
You are a database designer and administrator for a business with offices
throughout the United States. All of the database and other IT support per-
sonnel are located in the home office in Chicago, Illinois. You support a sin-
gle database server named “Ol_Faithful” with access provided to the remote
offices through remote networking.
The company recently acquired another company in the same industry,
primarily to get its customer list and other business intelligence. Your job
is to make the data available as quickly as possible with minimal interrup-
tion to current procedures and user access to current data. The new data-
base server, named “OurData,” is physically located in St. Louis, Missouri,
and runs a different DBMS than your existing database server. Also, you
determine that you can't import data from the new server into the existing
server without first upgrading Ol_Faithful to a more powerful computer
with larger hard disks.
How does this situation fit into the implementation models? What you
need is to change your current centralized model into a distributed model,
but with all of the servers physically located in the same place. Bring the
OurData server to Chicago. That's where all of your support staff is located,
and your infrastructure is designed to support centralized data access from
Chicago. Once you have the server physically in place, you can provide
access through a distributed model based on a heterogeneous data environ-
ment. This buys you time until you can upgrade Ol_Faithful and combine
the data onto one server.
databases are serving another important function. These
decision support data-
bases
are designed to support advanced data mining and provide support for strate-
gic decision making in an organization. Production databases and decision support
databases are typically large-scale databases designed to support several users' needs
within an organization. When a company uses both, the production database has
the added role of acting as the data source for the decision support database.
Individuals and single departments might also use private databases (referred
to in the figure as mass deployment databases), but this is typically discouraged
unless required for security or other reasons. However, having multiple databases
does not necessarily mean implementing multiple database servers. Instead, you
can implement multiple databases through a single server.
Businesses implement databases using either a centralized model or a dis-
tributed model. In the
centralized model,
you have a single, centrally located
