Database Brick

ITS Technical Architecture - Brick   

Database - where we stand now...

Primary Architect:  Vernon Yoshida

Description:   

 Databases are foundational parts of nearly every ITS system.  The future selection of databases is therefore critical for all future ITS activities.

There are two key ideas that have driven the creation of this brick…

1)  It is a market reality that Oracle and Microsoft will be among the preeminent database providers for the foreseeable future, and any new applications that we deploy at UH will require one of these database products as a base requirement.

2)  Open source database services are maturing, and we should move gradually to adopt them, but we should not make them foundational to our strategy at this time.

Notes

• Oracle is used with most of our administrative applications, including out student, financial, and HR applications.  It is very unlikely we will be able to migrate these enterprise apps to another RDBMS

• SQL Server is used with eThority and Hawaii DXP.  It is unlikely either vendor will support another RDBMS.

• Percona Server, using the XtraDB storage engine, supports the Zabbix monitoring tool used by the ITS TI System Administration group. It is a open source MySQL fork.

• ITS also uses Percona’s XtraBackup, an open source hot backup solution, to back up our MySQL and Percona Server databases.

• ITS gets Enterprise MySQL support from Oracle.

Emerging Trends

• Growth of cloud services will likely drive ITS database services in the future.  Some applications will use Software as a Service and the database will be less visible (even invisible) to UH.  Some applications may need a Platform as a Service (e.g. Amazon RedShift) where database controls will be limited.  And some will need IaaS where more traditional database administration will be needed.

• Researchers (and eventually administrators) are increasingly adopting big data analytic platforms (e.g. Hadoop).

• Growth of structured data is likely to accelerate over the next few years as new big data and analytical systems come online (e.g. enterprise data warehouse).

• UH warehousing/BI project could lead to ITS altering its database strategy.

Change History

• Reviewed by TAC in September 2014

  • suggestion: create a “where we stand now” brick, develop more guiding principles, then create a “radical” brick challenging some of the difficult decisions/principles

• Brick first created August 2014
  
  

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