Unit 3- Discussion Board

Primary Task Response: Within the Discussion Board area, write 400–600 words that respond to the following questions with your thoughts, ideas, and comments. This will be the foundation for future discussions by your classmates. Be substantive and clear, and use examples to reinforce your ideas.

The Web as a platform for database systems has brought both merits and challenges to business and consumers of the products and services produced by the business. Please study the relevant content in the course materials, and also investigate the library and Internet for the definitions and functions of the Web and the requirements for Web-DBMS integration as needed, then conduct the following tasks:

Please list at list at least 5 items for advantages and disadvantages for Web-DBMS integration. Please point out the main reason for each item.

Please provide your thoughts on what could be the best approach to integrate Web and DBMS for a given company.

Unit 3 Discussion Board gives the researcher the opportunity to study the concept of Web-DBMS. A web-dbms can essentially be seen or defined as a cloud database. These days there are many companies offering web-dbms services for consumer or enterprise usage. Some of the major players are Microsoft which offers web-dbms as part of its Azure offerings, and Amazon offers the service as part of the vast AWS suite. Some of the offerings of the AWS suite include RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, Redshift, and ElastiCache. As a Global System Admin for Office 365 the researcher has access to web-dbms systems, and occasionally uses them to service the supported customer.

There are many reasons that a company may want to shift their on-site dbms to a web-dbms; however, there are advantages and disadvantages to doing so. A company should consider all of their options before jumping head first into using a web-dbms service. Below is a list of advantages and disadvantages to using a web-dbms service.

Advantages

Disadvantages

• A web-dbms allows for some else to manage the actual server that the database resides on.
• This can actually be a cost saving measure because there are no longer any costs associated with managing the server
• A web-dbms will drastically reduce hardware costs.
• At least for the database server, there will not be a cost for hardware.
• Since the web-dbms is housed on the Internet, it is platform independent
• Any client with the ability to connect with vpn that has a web browser will be able to connect to the web-dbms.
• Backup and recovery
• The web-dbms provider will offer backup and recovery as part of the service
• Graphical user interface
• A GUI will generally simplify usage of dbms and database access

If a company were to decide that web-dbms is for them, the best thing to do is to pick a strong service provider. As mentioned above, both Microsoft and Amazon have web-dbms services that they provide. Both Amazon and Microsoft have been in the business of web-dbms long enough that their service offerings are well-matured. For a company to begin integrating their dbms with the web, it would have to consider a method to migrate the data to the web. Both Amazon and Microsoft have tools to assist with this effort. Amazon has a service named Amazon AWS Migration Tool (AWS 2016), and Microsoft has tools that can help you migrate your SQL Server to an Azure VM (Microsoft 2016). If a company chose any of the offering of Amazon or Microsoft, the first step would be migration.

• Security
• Since most web-dbms offerings are on shared hardware, security may be a concern
• Limited control
• Since the infrastructure is owned by another party, control by the customer is very limited. The customer doesn’t control any of the key features associated with the operating system or hardware such as updates or performance tuning.
• Data costs
• The cost of data is often metered, so heavy data traffic can get expensive
• Reliability
• Since the data will be housed remotely connect through the Internet can pose reliability issues. ISPs can have issues causing problems with accessing data
• Location of the data
• Depending on the nature of the data, location may be an issue

References

Amazon. (2016). Cloud Databases with AWS. Retrieved August 7, 2016, from https://aws.amazon.com/products/databases/

Microsoft. (2016). Migrate a SQL Server database to SQL Server in an Azure VM. Retrieved August 7, 2016, from https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-machines-windows-migrate-sql/