Ridin' the Cloud: The Changing Database Scalability Landscape

The good and the bad news: The database landscape is evolving quicker than ever thanks to the ubiquity of cloud solutions and increasing expectations for real-time access to applications and information from anywhere.

The really good news: You don’t have to rework your entire database infrastructure to take advantage of the momentum.

By definition, tools exist and are designed to fix, solve and eliminate problems – regardless of the industry. But, when it comes to scaling a database, companies face many of the same questions/concerns. Do I need to change my infrastructure? How steep is the learning curve? What kind of application adjustments will I need to make?  And most importantly what is this going to cost?

Neovise, an independent research and analysis firm, tackled these issues head on in its recent whitepaper, “Database performance, scale, and management issues can have a substantial effect on overall business performance and market position.” Here are a couple key takeaways:

• Businesses Can’t Keep Up: Spending on infrastructure to keep pace with demand isn’t sustainable – leading to poor ROI, inconsistent business performance, opportunity loss and delays in service fulfillment.  Traditional methods of scaling demand expensive infrastructure changes like new servers, new networking and storage devices yet they still hit bottleneck issues as companies grow.
• Database Flexibility and Elasticity is a Must: Every business is different and you never know when the next spike will come (or worse – when a database will fail).  Technology needs to be able to respond and or adapt rapidly to unique business requirements and extend current capabilities.  Near-perfect application and data availability is the industry standard and the threshold for downtime is impossibly thin – and often results in customer loss.

For more details on the database scalability landscape, please check out the complete Neovise whitepaper: http://www.scalebase.com/resources/white-papers/