Architectural Change
I was talking with a colleague recently about how architectures have changed over the last decade, and how that change has brought about a lot of successes and failures. The discussion continued to come back to business rules and performance.
Coming from a SQL Server background I liked the ability to store my business rules close to my data in the form of stored procedures or functions. I was able to achieve optimum performance and centralization of the rules.
My colleague preferred, on the other hand, to store business rules outside the database engine for scalability reasons. Putting all your rules in the database restricted your ability to grow; you must simply by bigger/faster hardware or shard your data in some fashion.
With the size of data he was using, a single data store was not manageable. Sharding worked, but required a lot of code to implement and manage. It also resulted in taking some of the work outside of the database and placing it into the sharding layer, resulting in business logic now being in two places.
Of course this led us to the holy grail of software simplicity and performance. We wanted a distributed environment where the business rules were performed as close to the data as possible, like stored procedures on a relational database, but didn’t require a lot of extra coding to manage the distribution of the data, as well as the business logic.
It seems to me that the size of the average database, even for a small business, is increasing. As a result, I would think that we will see a lot of different architectures continue to be developed or matured in the next few years to meet the need.
Are there architectures you are considering or trying today that fit into the emerging needs for large scale data stores? I’m wondering if we can project the changes in the workforce resulting from this kind of change? Do you have thoughts on how this impacts what you do today? Or, perhaps, what new skills we will need to acquire for tomorrow?
Share your thoughts by writing to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
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