Database Management in the Cloud

Cloud Database Management

What’s Different About Cloud Database Management?

Database management has become more difficult since Big Data emerged in the picture. We now have unstructured and semi-structured data, which is substantially more challenging to assess than traditional, organized data such as product intelligence and business contacts. The mobile web generates a substantial volume of unstructured and semi-structured data.

The flow of unstructured and semi-structured data is expanding dramatically as more people worldwide use their mobile devices to access the internet and social media. Many businesses find it challenging to collect, organize, store, and analyze this data type.

​​The answer is the cloud, a realistic option for firms that don’t have a lot of money to spend on capital equipment or the funds to keep an in-house IT workforce capable of handling Big Data. As a result, many experts believe database-as-a-service (DBaaS) will eventually replace all except the most mission-critical and hyper-confidential data as the usual solution.

Cloud databases are distinct in that they allow customers to distribute data across large geographic areas and servers within a single physical data center. Cloud computing technology, which is enabled through virtualization, is the foundation for this capability. Because they were not built to allow virtualization, relational database management systems (RDBMS) cannot provide this service. To address this problem, many top DBaaS providers, such as Amazon and Microsoft, offer their own RDBMS apps optimized for cloud computing.

Several cloud database management solutions are available to assist enterprises with relational (SQL) and non-relational (NoSQL) data storage and analysis. A cloud database manager can be a cost-effective but versatile option for businesses that already use cloud databases or plan to do so in the future. Cloud database managers can considerably ease maintaining cloud databases, ensuring that companies correctly collect, organize, store, and analyze their data.

Moving From an RDBMS to a Cloud Database

Moving from an RDBMS to a cloud database can be straightforward or complex, depending on the application. When a company outgrows its historical RDBMS, migrating data to a cloud-based NoSQL database (also known as a non-relational database management system) has various advantages. For starters, NoSQL was created to store and retrieve large amounts of data without the need for specified relationships (i.e., Big Data). Data saved in a NoSQL database, on the other hand, can still be structured. Here are a few crucial points to remember regarding NoSQL databases and how they work:

• NoSQL databases, as their name implies, do not employ SQL as their query language.
• Only eventual consistency is guaranteed with NoSQL databases (not ACID).
• The architecture of NoSQL databases is distributed and fault-tolerant.

Cloud Database Basics

If you want to transition from a legacy RDBMS to a cloud database and manage it efficiently, you should first learn about the characteristics of NoSQL cloud databases.

The first quality is elasticity, which refers to the capacity to add and remove nodes (physical or virtual machines) as needed by the company and underlying application. When nodes are added or removed, this can be done as required without downtime. RDBMS makes elastic expansion and contraction challenging to manage, whereas NoSQL cloud databases are.

The second feature is scalability, directly tied to a cloud database’s elasticity. It is because the elasticity of a cloud database allows it to expand out linearly, allowing database performance to improve as needed. Scalability also refers to the ability to handle significant amounts of data in the same amount of time as small amounts, allowing you to satisfy SLA response times even when demand increases.

Users of cloud databases also benefit from high availability since they may rely on the cloud provider’s infrastructure, which is designed to facilitate data dispersion and redundancy. Because cloud providers can divide resources across different countries, a cloud application’s underlying database can read and write from any node in the cloud database, facilitating data dispersion.

Another critical feature is redundancy. Cloud databases can store redundant copies of data across a large geographic area or multiple physical server racks within the same data center. This method of distributing redundant copies aids in ensuring high availability.

All data types are supported by cloud databases, which have a flexible and dynamic schema that accepts all major data formats. Structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data are all included. Cloud databases are less expensive than traditional databases because they are elastic and scalable. It is because cloud computing is typically priced on a pay-as-you-go basis.

When considering migrating company data to a cloud platform, these characteristics give helpful background information that IT professionals and database managers can use.

Getting Started

Although managing a cloud database—or migrating from a traditional RDBMS to a cloud database—may appear daunting initially, the right cloud database management solution may make the process much simpler and more efficient.

About Enteros

Enteros offers a patented database performance management SaaS platform. It proactively identifies root causes of complex business-impacting database scalability and performance issues across a growing number of clouds, RDBMS, NoSQL, and machine learning database platforms.