To learn about the current and future state of databases, we spoke with and received insights from 19 IT professionals. We asked, "What are the keys to a successful database strategy?" Here’s what they shared with us:
Secure
- Keys to a successful database strategy are definitely in security and data management. “All” data should always be treated as highly sensitive and private at all times. Data should be protected at rest and during transport. Take whatever measures necessary to ensure data is secured. Along with data security and management, it is important to pay attention to data access and high availability. If you have secured data but you’re unable to access it, especially when needed, then data is not very useful.
- 1) When moving to the cloud one of the obstacles is paranoia about putting data into a public cloud and losing control. However, you’re already doing this when you put it in a private data center. You need the same security checks regardless of where you host. 2) Determine the database solution that’s best for your use case. Moving from commercial to open source is a fair amount of work. If it’s just data, it’s easier than if you have logic since most databases have proprietary logic for storage. Comes down to your comfort level and background.
Performance
- Speed and performance are key for our clients. Scalability is key for tomorrow’s data volumes. Extensibility is key so we provide a programming language as part of our database. Allows developers to embed new analytics, write new libraries, build applications on top of the database very, very quickly. Ingest data and query in real-time and then do clever things with that data.
- Our clients are always looking for performance. Financial services are moving from on-prem to cloud-native, so security is a concern followed by availability and scale depending on the use case.
- We recommend beginning with a data platform. There are use cases for databases themselves. Don’t compromise on the fundamental requirements of speed, performance, and scale. In almost every system, you will need to compromise on data consistency. Bring in mission-critical data with consistency, durability, high availability, security, consistent latency at any scale. For customers moving into microservices, building modular processing integrated with streaming, multi-tenancy is super critical. You need to be able to build hundreds or thousands of applications in the same cluster. Don’t manage 4,000 database instances. Everything in the same cluster adds to efficiency. Know what to expect on databases know what they’re good at. Type of applications people want to build is pretty broad. The database needs to be able to support transaction application, NoSQL applications, analytic applications, flexible query capabilities, indexes, analytics, and Spark integrations.
