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One of the characteristics of the digital age is the explosion in digital data, which is accessed, shared as well as stored by employees and stake holders of an organization. Such digital data has increased exponentially in recent years and its rate of increase is definitely not slowing down in the recent future. In such a situation, finding a specific set of files or data within the files contained within an organizational database is like searching for a digital needle in a massive digital haystack. One of the key reasons for emergence of modern-day database solutions is the requirement of facilitating faster search within the available data. Other reasons range from security of data to ensure compliance with applicable regulations to ensure accessibility of essential information throughout the enterprise. The key functions performed by a database in an enterprise are broadly classified into their functional requirements and their operational requirements.
Functional Requirements
These requirements may consist of general enterprise requirements of the database as well as industry/company-specific functions that need to be supported by the database deployed. One of the basic requirements is the necessity for a database to have well-defined database structure. The data model is also required to be rich enough for supporting the various aspects of the applications operating on the database. A suitable, often data model-specific, data definition language is also necessary for describing the database within the data model. Moreover a rich data manipulation language is also required to support database manipulation as well as to allow the generation of information from available data.
Built-in security measures are also an important functional requirement for a database. It is also preferable to have support for using add-on security solutions to enhance the security provided on the database. The security provided to the data stored a database is necessary for preventing unauthorized access of potentially sensitive data as well as for ensuring enterprise-wide compliance with any or all security requirements proposed by local or international bodies. The support for manipulation of available data is another important functional requirement for an enterprise database and this is achieved by using a database transactions and a suitable database manipulation language.
Operational Requirements
These requirements are necessary for a database to effectively support an application, when it is operational. Many an offshore software development company attempts to facilitate the availability of these functions to support the applications deployed for use with the enterprise database. In case of custom database solutions, programmers feed instructions through specially-designed database user tools and interfaces. In many cases, the operational requirements of a database are considered to be secondary functional requirements, which are as important as the primary functional requirements discussed earlier. Some of the leading operational requirements of an enterprise database are discussed next.
Availability
Databases are expected to provide pre-defined levels of availability to a user or user-group within the organization. The database needs to be configured in such a way that wait times for a specific function or set of functions takes the minimum possible time period. Moreover, the use of database should ideally extend round the clock to all users in an organization and across all departments.
Performance
An enterprise database is expected perform to perform according to requirements specified by the user as well as developer of the requirements. The performance metric of a database not into takes into account the time required to serve specific user requests, but also the capability of a database to automatically correct file system errors and minimize the downtime of the database.
User Isolation
This functionality is necessary to ensure that multiple users can log on to a database and carry out their activities without hampering the work of each other. This is performed by defining each task as a separate indivisible transaction, which is independent of other transactions carried out simultaneously on the database. Many a software development company specializes in providing solutions, which facilitate user isolation through suitably defined database transactions.
Recovery Functions
Am enterprise database needs to have key recovery functions so that in case of failure, only the barest minimum of data store is affected. This is usually achieved by using proactive mechanisms to continuous monitor the integrity of the data storage media in use as well as simultaneously maintaining adequate control on various supported user functions. A majority of the database solution development companies also provide various tools with the solution to help recover any data, which was damaged as a result of the failure. Ideally, the recovery should occur rapidly and without the use of any specialized application.
Backup and Restore Capability
The enterprise database is often a source of primary data storage for the organization and special measures are expected to be initiated for ensuring the back up of such data to an alternate, more permanent storage media. Such backup of data is usually done periodically and the process may be programmed automatically into the database application. The restore capability is closely associated with the backup ability of the database and such restore capabilities would enable the database to revert back to a stable state with minimum loss of data subsequent to a failure.
Data Independence
Data independence is directly related to the lifecycle of a database and this characteristic features a substantial impact on the cost as well as convenience of maintaining a database along with its associated application. The necessity to facilitate this function was the main driver for the introduction of the relational database model. In its general form the term means that changes in the structure of the database do not result in changes of the application associated with the database. This feature is often incorporated by companies providing database-oriented custom software development services to enhance the ease and decrease the cost of maintaining an enterprise database.
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