Online businesses are doing everything they can to fulfill people’s expectations when it comes to app performance because every end-user expects consistent uptime and high performance around the clock. These demands present a significant challenge because unlike personal apps, business apps are much more complex and real-time updates require a lightning-fast database. So, businesses wanting to boost the response time of their apps should start with designing their database prior to coding for a custom mobile app development. Before you start working on your next business app, let’s take a look at what goes into a good database design.

The Attributes of a Lightning-Fast Database

A database design is typically judged on the basis of:

Precision–A fast database should also be able to deliver fresh information because there is no point in being super fast if the system responds with stale data

Flexibility– The database design should facilitate modifications without needing re-work in the other parts of the technology stack, including the application layer

Efficiency–The database should work efficiently even with a minimum of compute resources

A good database model is a prerequisite for any interactive app that is at the heart of mission-critical business processes because the overall performance of the web and mobile apps is dependent on the database design.

Bottlenecks That Slow Down App Performance

The full stack of technologies involved in delivering an application is not easy to understand, and when issues crop up, troubleshooting can be difficult and time-consuming. These problems shift the focus of app developers from augmenting application functionality to fine-tuning apps and alleviating performance bottlenecks. The performance issues that arise in relation to databases can be classified into the following three categories:

1. Database Connection Pooling and Multiplexing

Certain databases do not allow several operations to be performed simultaneously on each connection so even if the connection is open it is not available until the result set is returned. Databases that do not impose this restriction incur far more overhead. Apps can take a long time to create and close a connection for every query, and many applications hold open connections they aren’t using, increasing the burden on the database servers. Multiplexing helps by enabling a relatively small number of connections to service many requests in parallel.

2. Poor Indexing Practice

The missing indexes of an unoptimized database have the potential to destroy a production application and drag down an entire site because when indexes are not properly created, it uses more hardware resources and kills query performance.

3. Load Balancing Ineffectiveness

If the database architecture is not designed to evolve with increasing data demands, the code base gets complicated over time and overloads the IDE. This situation forces developers to fragment modules into smaller workable units to avoid inviting downtime during failover and limits performance for remote users eventually increasing the odds of downtime.

Even if the modern database architecture supports horizontal scaling for increasing capacity, apps need extensive recoding to leverage a scaled out database architecture. This exercise is costly and time-consuming at best and takes your best developers off the task of improving application functionality in favor of mundane database tuning.

How Database Load Balancing Reduces Complexity and Saves Time

Database load balancing delivers dramatic performance improvements to web apps without needing any code modifications even in the most demanding situations. Its in-memory query caching allows you to exercise complete control over items depending on your application needs while ensuring complete transaction safety from start to end, for full ACID compliance.

A load balancer also reduces the number of database server connections by implementing multiplexing and connection pooling, which in turn boost app performance by optimizing server efficiency. Database load balancing software can dynamically load balance queries, increase capacity within a cluster, facilitate scale out, ensure end-to-end visibility and act a single point of control for all your database performance needs. It saves a lot of troubleshooting time and simplifies scale out while improving the performance and availability of applications. As clients place new demands on your online business and your database design is compelled to evolve, a load balancer will help your apps stay up and available to provide your users what they want.

About the author: A self-proclaimed tech geek, with a passion for ScaleArc’s disruptive technology innovation in database load balancing. Tony has a passion for dissecting tech topics such as transparent failover, centralized control, ACID compliance, database scalability and downtime effects. On his days off, he can be found watching sci-fi movies, rock climbing or volunteering.