Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
manager does not have the option of balancing the load across over the
day and the night. Hence the scalability of the database and its ability to
manage the varying load patterns across time is crucial to ensuring accept-
able performance levels from an end user perspective.
Integration
The use of the Internet for commercial transactions requires that data-
bases be able to talk to other databases to exchange information. This
means that databases may soon be required to send, receive and store a
messaging mechanism that is standardized across the web. The Extensible
Markup Language (XML) is becoming the communication language of the
web. Hence databases may soon be required to process XML statements.
Huge Amounts of Data Processed in Real Time
There is an increasing trend towards storing all the user actions occur-
ring in a web site in a data warehouse where it is then analyzed and mined
to better understand customer behavior, customer and product profitabil-
ity, and other e-business issues. Such data can grow exponentially and the
overall size of the data warehouses soon becomes a difficult issue to deal
with. E-business is also focused on a faster moving world. The information
flowing into the data warehouse, both continuously and in large volumes,
must be exploited more or less immediately, and then be relayed to opera-
tional systems for further processing.
STRATEGIES TO IMPROVE DATABASE PERFORMANCE
E-business poses significant new challenges to IS managers. This section
examines some options that can be used to improve database performance.
Architecture
In order to improve the database performance from the end user per-
spective the first issue that IS managers may need to address is the overall
IT application architecture. In order to achieve and address the twin chal-
lenges of scalability and performance, it's a good idea to explore the use of
a three-tier architecture involving the use of a middleware product.
From a database perspective e-businesses tend to drive the centraliza-
tion of data. However the use of multiple, distributed databases should be
explored. The best approach may turn out to be to distribute the data
across multiple databases based on an analysis of the nature of transac-
tions being carried out against the entire spectrum of data. If most visitors
to the web site just want details on products and services offered by the
business then it may be appropriate to dedicate a database to this and hold
customer demographic information in a separate database.
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