Concrete planning is very important in software development, I believe there is nothing like a small application as far as it will interface with the world.80% of what disrupts a big application can also affect a ‘small’ application. Now to avert unforeseen situations like this is very important that the technical team sit down to plan very well with edge cases being put into consideration.“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” — Abraham Lincoln. Someone won’t know the depth of this quote until poor planning land you at a big loss.
Database management is very crucial to effective planning. What is being stored on the database matters a lot and they can reflect if planning time was effective or not.
I worked on an application some time ago where we capture images and stored them somewhere and later retrieve them for view. Not that we didn’t really plan but it was not well planned. There are indications for good planning: How many users (who can access the application) are we envisaging to use the application, How many years does the planning covers and long term data storage.
Fortunately, the application was working fine for a couple of months, I was actually happy that we achieve a feat, really it was a feat for me to have a working application on production. The joy doesn’t last more than 4 months when usage increase significantly and we had system disruption on production at the heart of the operation. The agitation was so much that we were careful not to even touch anything at that point. Any attempt to do anything can further affect another thing hence compounding the problem.
What then do we have to do so that user can continue their operation? We needed to remove long term images so as to have space for incoming ones. This is hazardous data loss for the team. Immediately we had this problem we begin to make research about utilising Cloud Services to provide a “lasting” solution.
When storing data of any form is very important to consider what cloud computing has provided. Object, images, audio, video, excel, MsWord, pdf all are not meant to be stored in the same data storage. Irrespective of the format it has been converted to, there is a different resource that caters for storing different types of objects. It may be better to use non-relational repositories that can store data in its original format, but that allows fast storage and retrieval access to this data. One day reality we catch up on you that might cost you a loss of money, life or data. Why would you save blob (Unstructured data)in an SQL Server?
In a recent post of mine, I’ll be demonstrating practical ways files are being stored appropriately by using cloud resources (Azure specifically).
But then in one of two ways you would have gained something that will probably shape your thinking about efficient planning in software development. You need the required knowledge to make the right choice of resource to use.
Azure will be holding free training on their service that will give participants the opportunity to take Microsoft Azure Fundamentals certification exam without a cost. You can use this link to register for the training https://emails.microsoft.com/MTU3LUdRRS0zODIAAAGBxa4xFrU9BxjKxQn_MU0mJnP439B46h8Ug2O5d3cPOpNcpaYcwKqac3JE9uP8tiPEynnC_eo=
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