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2 Billion MySQL Records

Yesterday Gary Gray, a friend of mine sent me the following screenshot. He's got a database table with 2 billion records he intends to use Magic on, and he wanted to show it to me, thinking I'd probably be like, "That's cool." Gary works for Dialtone in South Africa, and is used to handling a "monster amount of data". For the record, neither Gary nor I would want to encourage anyone to handle 2 billion records in MySQL, but as you can obviously, see it is possible.

This of course is a legacy system. If it was started today, Gary would obviously use ScyllaDB, Cassandra, or something similar. Simply counting the records in the table above requires 5 minutes of execution in MySQL workbench. Obviously, such sizes are not for those faint at heart. Such a database also implies a lot of inserts.  This makes it impossible to add indexes, resulting in every select query you do towards it having some sort of where clause in it that implies a full table scan. However, it is possible.

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Top 3 Approaches to Legacy System Modernization

Your system is putting your business at risk and you haven’t fixed it. Don’t touch what isn’t broken, right? Well, while that may be currently working for you, you are walking down a slippery slope. Legacy systems for long-term business operations come with many risks, and it may be time for a change. We will discuss ways to move on from legacy systems to put your business in a better position.

Define Your Legacy System

There is no standard or generally accepted definition of a legacy system. When talking about legacy systems, age is not the first point of consideration. While this may be a factor, it is not always the case because newer systems and software can be classified as legacy systems.

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Application Modernization and 6 R’s

Enhanced functionality, rapid innovation, increased efficiency, reduced operational and infrastructure costs, more scalability, improved overall experience, and resiliency ... It's like a door to unlimited possibilities has been unlocked with the cloud. 

Shifting your business' apps to the cloud has numerous advantages, including those outlined above. The problem is that many firms don't grasp that leveraging the cloud's benefits requires a little more than just application transfer. 

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Application Architecture: Best Practices for Future-Proofing Your Apps

Have you ever heard the saying, 'architects hate spaghetti?' As software architects, it is our responsibility to envision and design systems capable of supporting the cutthroat business models of this era. In that sense, it's fundamental to develop ways to evolve our application architecture to match business concepts and processes correctly. Otherwise, the architecture won’t be structurally sound, and we’ll have to deal with a dreadful 'spaghetti architecture.'

In this blog post, I’ll share some of the best practices you should follow to build a structured and scalable application architecture while avoiding turning your systems into a spaghetti bowl. This article is based on a recent Tech Talk on the same topic, Web and Mobile Architecture with Architecture Dashboard. For a more detailed discussion, I invite you to take a look.

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Digital Transformation to Microservices: The Approach

I will start with a scenario where a large system is being developed for over a decade. With time, it has become a gigantic system with ideas from so many developers, and the team is finding it costly and time-consuming to maintain the system on daily basis.

The technology team and management are very keen on a new buzzword called microservices. But it involves the cost of transformation.