Welcome to the web site of Scalable Data Solutions, an IT company that specialises in the design and implementation of high performance, scalable database systems.
Databases are everywhere in business – most small businesses have some kind of customer or order information system, and as companies get bigger, the scale, complexity and scope of these database systems greatly increases, very often leading companies to develop their own database systems that exactly meet their own complex business requirements.
The problem with databases
The major problem with most business database systems is that they are often implemented by developers who do not fully understand how databases work most efficiently. Whilst the developers may be first class front-end developers, or excel at architecting and implementing complex system interactions, these skills do not translate well to database development – in fact, to program a database using the traditional constructs and patterns of most programming languages often results in the worst possible database performance.
The problem is not helped by the abundance of rapid application development tools that offer to automatically generate data-access layers – or even entire database schema's – to increase the productivity of developers. Whilst these products do speed up the development process, they most often do not support - or require complex customisation in order to support – efficient data access and manipulation processes.
These factors result in database implementations that do not scale well. This means that the system does not perform as expected as throughput increases – if the throughput doubles, the system will be more than twice as loaded, and take more than twice as long to process the data. The throughput / performance graph is exponential, rather than linear (see examples to the right), so from a management perspective, the performance of the system as load increases cannot be accurately extrapolated.
For a more mature system that may already be significantly loaded, this problem will exhibit itself as performance issues. Jobs take longer than expected to complete, which leads to more load on the system for more of the day. This affects subsequent processes, and a vicious circle can ensue, with jobs that normally perform well being affected by long running jobs from earlier in the process day, causing them to run long and affect subsequent processes, and so on. In the worst cases, systems can grind to a halt and be unable to complete a single days processing within 24 hours, badly affecting the business in the process.
Even when the circumstances are less severe than this, the system can be very sensitive to errors - a failed process can result in hours of effort to re-process the failed job, and then reschedule any dependant subsequent processes. This can quickly result in high running costs - in terms of money and effort - for the system.
The solution
Scalable Data Solutions are experts at designing and implementing high performance database systems that scale in a consistent manner. Specialising in the SQL Server and Informix database engines, we offer a variety of services to help businesses overcome or avoid performance and scaling issues with their database systems - use the links below, or the menu bar at the top of the page to find out more.
For more information, or to discuss your specific requirements, please Contact Us.