CSCI 112: Contemporary Databases

Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, Sustainability

6 Pillars of Well-Architected Framework

Operational Excellence

A WAF pillar that refers to the ability of your system to support required workloads effectively

Required Latency

The amount of time a request travels from server to the database

IOPS (Input/Output per Second)

The performance of storage devices like HDDs or SSDs to process requests.

Read/Write Throughput

the amount of data that can be read or written in a database system for a specific amount of time

Concurrency

the capability of a database system to process requests at the same time

Read Replicas

Servers that are dedicated to read operations

Clustering

Decoupled servers that are used to efficiently distribute database load

Geo-distributed Deployments

Similar to clustering, but the servers are located in separate physical locations

Security

A WAF pillar that focuses on fortifying all fronts. Asks the question “Is my database secured from exploits?”

Principle of Least Privilege

A principle in security where you only give access to whoever needs it or explicitly deny access to those who shouldn’t have it.

Reliability

A WAF pillar that refers to the ability of your distributed system architecture to address  failures automatically, with minimal human intervention.

Self-healing

A characteristic of a server such that when a server goes down, does it have the ability to switch traffic  to an available server while it spawns a new server to replace the faulty one?

Auto-scaling

A characteristic of a server such that when demand for my applications rise, does my distributed system architecture have the ability to scale and meet the demand?

Cost Optimization

A WAF Pillar that refers to the ability to run your systems and deliver your business value with the lowest cost possible.

Performance Efficiency

A WAF pillar that refers to the ability to use computing resources and databases efficiently to meet system requirements as they evolve. Asks the question, “Am I using the correct database for the correct workload?”

Sustainability

A WAF pillar that refers to the ability of your server to run for a long period of time

Document Oriented Databases

What do DODs mean?

documents

DODs uses _________ as the primary unit of storage/

JSON, BSON, XML

Possible formats for DODs

Collection

Group of related documents

schema-less, hierarchical, self-describing, collections

Key characteristics of DODs

schema-less

A key characteristic of DODs that refers to it having no fixed structure, fields can vary

hierarchical

A key characteristic of DODs that refers to it supporting nested objects and arrays

self-defining

A key characteristic of DODs which says that a document contains all required information

Key-Valued Pairs

When we have a field + a value, what do we get?

Denormalization

refers to when data may be duplicated across documents

MongoDB

is by far the most popular document database supports indexing for fast queries, aggregation pipelines for complex data operations, and sharding for large-scale deployments

Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability

ACID meaning

Atomicity

is all based around this idea of togetherness. When carrying out any kind of database transaction, it often consists of multiple operations. With this, either every operation succeeds or none of them do.

Consistency

is about ensuring that changes made as part of a transaction are consistent with any database constraints. If the data at any stage goes against these constraints, the whole transaction will fail

Isolation

is there to make sure that all transactions are run in an isolated environment without interfering with each other

Durability

it ensures that no matter what happens, once a transaction is complete, the changes in that transaction are written to the database. This makes sure that data changes are persisted, even in the event of a power failure or system crash.