Database Design

Give your project the best possible start with our Design and Transition service.

Our Design & Transition Service

N4Stack’s Design and Transition service gives your project the best possible start. We typically spend a couple of days doing onsite workshops with you and your team before delivering a high-level design and a detailed recommendations report. Our core workshop modules are:

Technology Options

Database Modelling

Database Architecture

Choosing a database is a long term decision and changing that decision later can be a difficult and expensive proposition. Our independent position in the marketplace combined with the skills and experience of our multi-platform database experts provides the base for a compelling service to help our customers pick the right database technology for the right job. This database design model is there to help our customers test and challenge their default database vendor choice. The rise of NoSQL and cloud native database options provide customers with a wide range of options. Answers to questions such as the below examples, can result in very different technology and vendor choices:

What type of data is the project using (numbers, records, text, complex etc..)?
What is the volume of data and how fast is new data generated?
What are the read vs write volumes and ratio?
What are the security requirements?
What type of transactions are expected, do they need to be atomic?
How many users/devices access the data concurrently and what is the anticipated growth?
Does the data need to be distributed?
What is the core development environment language?
How much computation is involved in data analysis?
What the project budget and internal skills/ support capability?
What other technologies need integration?
What is the preferred infrastructure choice e.g. Cloud, Dedicated?
What are the potential scaling scenarios?

The database technology options module typically consists of a 1-2 day onsite workshop followed by a recommendations report.

Developing a well-designed data model and schema at the beginning of a project is key to achieving better performance, simplified queries, and optimisation of the infrastructure deployment for your application. During the engagement, our experienced consultants collaborate with you and your team to gather the data and query requirements. The consultant creates a design draft based on your application requirements, with consideration to other requirements such as multi-tenancy, Warehousing etc. and then delivers a final database design report with best practice recommendations. The type of database i.e. Relational, NoSQL: Document, Key Value, Columnar or Graph will drive the core focus areas of this design workshop as there are large variations in data model requirements. You can expect to come away from the engagement with a clear understanding of how the chosen database technology data model works with recommendations tailored to the needs of your business. You will also develop an understanding of the process for designing performant queries and schemas.

If you are looking for high performance and availability from your database deployment, then the N4Stack Database Architecture Design service will provide you with a blueprint to achieve your goals. Typically a 2-3 day design workshop with the development and operational teams, this service addresses the following design areas:

Application & Business Needs Assessment
Performance Requirements
Security Requirements
Distributed Deployments and Replication
Infrastructure Requirements
Scaling (Vertical or Horizontal)
High Availability
Capacity Planning
Disaster Recovery & Backup

Following the workshop we will deliver a high level design and a detailed report of recommendations.

Case study

Due to the nature of the PD Ports business, there are many business-critical applications that must be operational on a true 24*7 basis and as such, the database environments are designed with optimal high availability in mind.

Whilst employing a highly skilled internal technical team, PD Ports recognised that it needed DBA experts on a continuous basis to ensure ongoing environment optimisation and to allow the internal technical team to focus on the business-specific application work.

Read case study