Co-Founder Taliferro
Introduction
The days of the monolithic database are long gone. In their place, modern applications rely on a distributed architecture that divides data across multiple databases. But why? What benefits can you expect from separating your database? Let's look at four key reasons companies are moving to SQL Data Separation.
Scalability
Your data can become a bottleneck if it is in a single database. This will make your application slow down or stop altogether. As the number of users increases, the number of transactions also increases, and so does the size of your database. It would help if you were prepared for this by designing an architecture considering these increasing requirements.
Performance
Performance is one of the most common reasons for separating databases. Data and code should be separated to avoid the "write-to-disk" performance bottleneck when data and code are stored together. This means that when you're developing a new application, it's best to separate your database from your application code so that you can test changes to either independently. It also means that your production database should be stored separately from other applications on your server so that it doesn't compete with them for resources or suffer any downtime if they go down unexpectedly. Finally, the database layer itself needs its hardware—the CPU and RAM required to run complex queries against large amounts of data cannot be provided by most cloud providers; this means if you don't have a dedicated server (or cluster), then you'll have no choice but to replicate your entire database across multiple servers while maintaining high availability and low latency—which will slow down performance even further.
Efficiency
Separating your database can be a significant advantage when it comes to efficiency. Separate databases are easier to manage, scale, back up, and secure than monolithic databases.
- Efficient management: When you have one database that needs to be managed for all your applications, making changes in one part without instantly affecting other parts of the application is challenging. For example, suppose you want to add a new field in an employee database table for performance tracking purposes but not affect others working with this same table. In that case, you need two separate databases: one for salespeople and another for HR, who use this information only occasionally.
- Easier scaling: If you have multiple different applications using the same database, then scaling becomes hard because every time there is an increase in demand or load on that particular database, all apps have to scale up at once along with it (thus increasing costs). With separated databases, each app can scale independently without affecting other apps, making them much cheaper than monolithic ones over time since they don't have high overhead costs associated with maintaining their scaling capabilities as often as they would otherwise need to.
Security
Separating your database from your applications is one of the best ways to secure your data. This will reduce the chance of data loss, theft, and corruption.
- Data isolation: By separating the application from the database, you reduce the risk of exploitable vulnerabilities in software being exploited by unauthorized access to data. The separation also makes detecting and analyzing malicious activity on an application's user system easier.
- Improved compliance: Compliance can be much more easily achieved when using a separate SQL Server instance for reporting needs than with a traditional 3-tier architecture where all components are present in one server instance, which may contain sensitive information like personal details or financial transaction history.
Data separation is a good thing - but there are other things you can do. Separating your data into multiple databases will improve performance, scalability, efficiency, and security - and it can be done with minimal changes to your application code.
Conclusion
With the benefits of database separation, you can manage your data more robustly and efficiently. You'll have more control over your database's performance, efficiency, and security.
Tyrone Showers