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

Heya folks,
The lack of initial description leaves a lot to the designer to make
suggestions about once he knows more about the scenario.. I suggested a
simple platform that can handle most web ui/database scenarios. It
works for a great deal of projects.

Josh is right on the money with what he wrote. However it seems like,
at least through my own experience, that 90% of the time the web client
has some idea of what they want and no time to actually implement it or
think about scaling, load, and how content delivery will be done..
leaving a lot of that up to the developer in the first place.

I'd love to have a client that knew how to answer the below questions
adequately :)

Much Love,
Shane

Josh Rhoades wrote:
> 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 Tue Mar 17 11:06:03 2009