Question

Identify what kind of knowledge and skills a database designer should have. Evaluate these skills based on how the changing landscape of modern databases (in the mobile computing, cloud computing era) could influence these skills.

Answer 1

The database designer must have working knowledge of the following:

• Data Modeling
• Database design
• Object-Oriented Analysis and Design techniques
• System Architecture, including Database and System performance tuning
• hardware and network workload balancing
• Database Administration
• an understanding of the implementation language and environment.

Data Modelling:

The Data Modeling landscapes have evolved significantly in the past few years, from the traditional relational model to now include non-relational models as well. The growth of Big Data and its unstructured and semi-structured data formats, along with trends in Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Data Lakes, Machine Learning and others pushing the need for more advanced concepts and practices. Such a monumental shift has caused Data Modeling to also advance. The fundamental changes in data infrastructure and newer technology evolution have together contributed to this Data Management development.

Database design:

It would be hard to deny the seismic shift that has occurred in the database landscape. Hadoop, Spark, MongoDB, Cassandra, and many other non-relational systems today form an important and growing part of the enterprise data architecture of many, if not most, Fortune 500 companies. It is, of course, possible to argue that all these new technologies are a mistake and that the relational model and the transactional SQL relational database represent a better solution and that eventually the market will “come to its senses” and return to the relational fold.

Object Oriented analysis and Design Techniques:

The future contains more standardization of functional programming techniques in OOP environments, particularly lambda expressions and closures, and more robust meta-programming constructs. Applying design patterns automatically through generic or meta programming techniques is an interesting area.

System Architecture:

Along with the proliferation of data and database types, the database administrator skill set is rapidly changing. Database administrators have historically specialized by database platform-Oracle, SQL Server, etc. Now administrators have to be generalists who are familiar with different database platforms and the ability to recommend the right fit for an application. But they also have to be specialists that can support a database to meet business application requirements.

As IT increasingly leverages the cloud, the push is for database administrators to be data-center agnostic. They have to be ready to support databases for applications that are hosted both on premises (private cloud) and in the public cloud.

Many developers are turning from traditional relational database structure to a dynamic structure like MongoDB because data integration is easier and faster for some applications. The dynamic structure allows users to store data in a single document, easily perform ad-hoc queries, and add fields later on the fly. It’s also free; its open source roots only add to its appeal. The rise of MongoDB has significantly affected the database landscape, making the choice of database at the outset even more important.