Relational Database Design Review

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!

You have bright, enterprising, experienced developers who have churned out many applications.  They know what they’re doing. So why pay for a relational database design review?

When an application is initially designed and the data volume is relatively small, database servers perform very well.  It’s typical when the data volume becomes large that the design flaws are manifest and the application starts to bog down leaving users, or worse, customers feeling the pain.  At this time, fixing an application can prove very expensive.

If the database server is on-premise or in the cloud (such as virtual machines, Azure SQL Database or Amazon RDS), improper database design can lead to over sized databases, over sized backups, and an overpowered server to compensate for poorly designed database or queries.  All of these considerations significantly impact the cost of maintaining an application.

Developers often have too many technical skills and business requirements to learn and too often don’t have the time or capacity to learn the nuances of scalable database design.  Investing a little now for a database review can yield significant savings in the future.

Concepts: Indexing strategies, database maintenance, database backups, database performance, choosing optimal data types, building an ERD

Primary Databases: SQL Server, DB2, DB2 for i, Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft Access