[aklug] Re: Any web/database people out there?

Jim,

I assume your brother means he's looking for help with database
design, followed by a web application front-end to manage it. I'll
also guess that anyone looking seriously to take on this kind of work
will be needing more information than just the number of rows in a
database.

I'll offer the following questions I'd get answered before approaching
anyone about building something. Otherwise, you'll probably spend a
lot of time finding out what some of the important questions are.

1) Who is going to use the database/application? How will they use it?
These kinds of questions are usually vastly more important than which
database you choose, or what you use to build the application. These
are usually collected as a huge set of "use cases," that are then
established into requirement specifications for an application. I
would collect a few of these, written as "stories," depicting how a
user will interact, the results expected, etc.

2) Is the data sensitive, such that it needs to be protected? Backed
up? Available for a certain percentage of the day? It's easy to skip
these kinds of concerns at the beginning, but devastating when they're
ignored.

3) Database folk like to deal with entities and relationships,
particularly in the design phase of projects. For example, a Person
may have a name, a phone number, a street address, but that Person may
also have none, one, or more Pets, each that have their own names,
ages, etc. Simple statements like this define the shape of the
database, same as how the use cases above define the shape of the
application. It's the database person's job to gleen these kind of
relationships from what gets answered in 1), but it's always helpful
to have an idea of what's critically important for an application in
the beginning rather than having to do costly redesign later on.

I can't really say "I know a guy, girl, company, etc." which would
probably be more helpful than what I've got written so far. For
whoever you do find, don't let them convince you that paying huge
amounts of money for software like Oracle or some fancy Java web
server is a good idea. Open source web app development, particularly
in recent years, has been rapid and vast, and there are many freely
available and powerful tools any business can use.

On a personal note, a database isn't big until it's at least a million
rows. Or you're doing something with it so unholy that even a thousand
rows brings it to its knees. Erm, not that I've built something like
that before...

Regards,
Josh

On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 9:27 PM, Jim <jwadell@gci.net> wrote:
> got the following from my brother:
>
> Any idea who could do a big database for me? =A0Tens of thousands of
> records. =A0Web enabled. =A0Probably Oracle...
>
> Probably mysql, but who is to quibble. Anyone do web databases? not sure
> of the parameters, but this might be a chance to do a smallish web projec=
t!
>
> Jim
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Received on Mon Mar 16 22:51:08 2009