Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
over emphasized. Ongoing maintenance can also include training require-
ments for the staff maintaining the web sites, cost of upgrading and main-
taining the infrastructure including the hardware and software, and the
cost of communications. Such recurring expenditures must be included in
the budgeted.
DATABASE REQUIREMENTS IN E-BUSINESS
A well-designed web site offers a good start for attracting potential cus-
tomers to your business. Most commercial sites handle volumes of infor-
mation that need the use of a database at the back end to both hold corpo-
rate information and to track customer related information. This places
enormous demands on the database servers to support applications that
have an unpredictable number of transactions, potentially large data flow,
and high performance requirements. All these factors taken together are
unprecedented.
Availability
While availability of the database server and its “up-time” has always
been a key concern for IS managers at corporations, the 365x24x7 nature
of the web places unprecedented demands. There cannot be any
“sched-
uled maintenance downtimes”
let alone any unplanned outages. Competi-
tors are only a click away and a customer who cannot use your web-site is
a lost customer.
Security
Web sites are open around the clock and are also open to users from all
over the world. All information needed by customers must be accessible
via the web site. This presents a security nightmare from the IS managers
viewpoint. These requirements can be an open invitation to hackers and
people with malicious intent to come in and create havoc at your web site.
Databases, containing the core value of your business, must be protected
from such elements. Adequate security architecture must be build across
the key elements of the database server. If the data is spread across multi-
ple instances of the database then critical customer and business informa-
tion, like credit cards and financial details, need extra security when com-
pared to data that is not quite so strategic (e.g. product catalogs).
Scalability
In the earlier days of databases corporate IS managers had a pretty good
handle on issues like number of users, number and type of transac-
tions/queries and rate of data growth. However in the world of e-business
these are all variables which are difficult to predict with accuracy. There
could be millions of concurrent users on the Internet. In addition the IS
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