I’d like to wrap up this week editorials with some observations on database security. We’ve been talking about application role level security, and application to REST services security. Including database security covers the three basic layers of an Internal WAN based application. Opening your application to the world wide web is another matter altogether. In the old days of two […]

I was talking with a couple developers a while ago about security. They had developed a really nice security framework allowing users to be granted role based access to their application. Based on the user’s role(s), Buttons and Controls would appear or be hidden, restricting the user experience to the permissions they had been granted through their roles. The whole […]

While talking about ACID transactions, we have been looking at different approaches to persist data, using Relational, Sharded, and NoSQL/Distributed data stores. They all have one thing in common: They save and retrieve data. As we compare the different technologies, we tend to think of them as mutually exclusive. Are they really mutually exclusive? Is there a potential flaw in […]

Eventual Consistency does not violate Consistency in ACID. Why is this a big thing? Because most NoSql engines do not block access to a data record until it has been propagated to all replicate data stores. The majority of NoSql databases have been designed to handle performance of high demand OLTP or OLAP systems with heavy Insert/Update traffic. In order […]

One of our readers recently sent me a link to GitHub, demonstrating how you can achieve ACID capabilities in the Amazon DynammoDB. Amazon DynamoDB is a distributed database engine running in the Amazon services. It released with the capabilities of supporting Consistency and Durability, without focusing on Atomicity and Isolation. Lookup ACID on Wiki if you are not familiar with […]

I can remember a time when there was a lot of debate regarding what data engine should be used. Se should use Oracle if we want to be able to scale, or handle heavy loads. We should use Sybase because it runs on different hardware. We should use SQL Server because it is much less expensive per seat, or calculation. […]

There’s another database engine entering the already full market place. Cockroach DB will surely get your attention, simply by the name. What makes this new data engine different? Why would you consider it? At the root, Cockroach DB is a distributed database engine. Data is highly scalable, to petabytes and more through the implementation of a fabric composed of multiple […]

I’d like to make one more posting on the topic of business rules, summarizing some of the different thoughts. In reality, business rules appear in just about any layer. Here are some examples. User entry validation may often be implemented in the User Experience. It can reside in a browser as JavaScript, in a GUI application as a control, or […]

Yesterday, one of our readers put the pressure on me by asking, “What are business rules?” What a great question. I’m not sure I have the best answer. But, I’d like to give it some effort, with the desire for others to comment, to keep me honest, and share their own perspective. I would say that the simplest rules are […]

I’ve been an advocate of centralizing all business rules in the database for 20+ years. Working with some extremely talented individuals the following 10 years I have been convinced that storing business rules on the database is not the only viable option, and does not have to be the best performing one. In the last 6 years I was the […]