DBA Consulting Insight – Creating and Managing a Social Media Database
Creating and managing your social media database the right way could mean the difference between having a social presence and generating revenue for your business.
The internet has offered businesses numerous opportunities to shine. From large enterprises to small scale companies, everyone can find something beneficial on the web. People nowadays tend to make a lot of money through the freelance jobs they do, content they share, and the e-commerce businesses they run. The advent and growing popularity of social media platforms have added to this as well.
It may be a new piece of information to many, and some may even take it with a pinch of salt thinking how social networking sites generate money, but this is very true. There are a lot of businesses and individuals who are making enough money through their social media platforms. If you own even a local social networking site, you can only imagine how much it is possible to generate money through it.
What makes FB and Twitter famous?
You can find plenty of successful social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram which have real good ideas behind them with flawless execution to reap results. If you are planning to create a good networking website and promote it to bring in results and revenue through it, you must have to work on out of the box ideas and proper execution to enjoy desirable results.
One primary thing to consider while you plan for a social networking site or a mobile app for this purpose is the need to set up an efficient database. In the entire gamut of operations that you need to handle for social networking site administration, DBA may be the hardest of the tasks.
Construction of database
Constructing a database is not as easy as you may imagine. There are many issues to tackle including the number of users, the nature of data, the extent and volume of data and so on. For example, you may need to plan and create a MySQL database which can handle a user environment of nearly 10,000 comfortably. It poses a lot of technical requirements such as creating an architecture and designing the database.
- The architecture of a typical database is the most complex feature to accomplish in a database set up. You need experts to handle this part, and nothing short of excellence is required to do this part successfully.
- Creation of a great database is a costly affair and correction of mistakes may further cost you more. So, this has to be done at the first point itself to avoid any unfortunate incidents and financial overheads in the future.
There are many features which are essential for all sorts of website databases. When you are thinking of building a social networking site, you need to take care of the following aspects:
- Security
- Recovery and backup
- Interoperability
- Close monitoring
A backup system is also of utmost importance. In the event of a crash, the vital information needs to be recovered. Latest technologies have made it possible to build a fantastic database for even the small businesses by ensuring all of the above. All that you should do is contact a reliable DBA consulting service to identify the best possible database administration process matching to your business.
Managing traffic
The capacity of your database is a critical aspect. When it comes to maintaining a social networking website, the primary concern is always traffic. As your site gets popular day by day, you have to cope with increasing traffic. There will be people visiting your site and submitting a vast amount of information on a daily basis. If you have a reliable database system, you will not face any issues with the traffic routed to your website.
A dedicated DBA is necessary if you are serious about establishing your social media site. Someone should be there to monitor your database and for its upkeep. Even the minor errors may end up making your website dysfunctional over time. The longer downtime you have to suffer due to database errors, the more traffic and money you will lose.
Contract DBA services
A database accident can be avoided if you hire a dedicated and expert DBA service. There are two distinct ways you can try this.
- You can now get remote DBA Many providers are offering expert DBA services with administrators who always monitor your site and database and provide maintenance of the same.
- If you have a large volume of data to handle, you can also think of hiring an in-house DBA. However, when you hire an individual DBA, this person may be unavailable on weekends and during holidays. So, there are chances that your site may not get the regular monitoring it requires. This is the reason why DBA consulting is preferred more now over hiring individual DBA.
Essentials of social media DB
When it comes to managing a social media database, there are critical features to keep an eye on.
- Response time
Performance is the key factor when it comes to the success of a social media site. Response time is usually expressed as percentiles, not averages. Database performance is often optimized for writes and reads. Caching the reads will help reduce the read traffic to the database and cut down the response times as seen by the users. Writes can be adequately buffered so that the database does not get overwhelmed even during the peak hours.
- Scalability
Scalability is the volume of users your social networking site can handle simultaneously. It is referred to as requests per second. An ideal social media site database should be capable of supporting write scaling and read scaling with the use of a lock-free data structure.
- Fault tolerance
Fault tolerance refers to the instances of failures it can withstand. Your ultimate goal is to ensure that the site does not stop working due to database failures. Even on close monitoring, it is possible that errors will occur at some point. With the help of expert DBAs, it is possible to construct and maintain a database with high fault tolerance.
Social networking sites are now meant to bring in business and money, and this is made possible with the volume of traffic such a site attracts. The site must have a high performing, fault-tolerant, and scalable database in place and a perfect DBA service to monitor and ensure its performance and uptime.
