Database Design

The value of an organization’s information resources

We believe that high-quality IT initiatives require a broad and deep analysis of an organization’s purpose and procedures, and a deliberate approach to what data is captured and how it is stored. We apply our technology skills to turn data into a performing assets for you. Our primary concerns are focused on:

• Extracting, organizing and integrating our customers’ data
• Ensuring that the software framework meets the changing needs of our customers over the long term.
• Safeguarding the accuracy and integrity of customer’s data by careful design of the database itself.

Database Architecture – the foundation of an application

A well-designed database architecture often makes the difference between the success and failure of an end-user application. Just as the foundation of a house is critical to the quality of the entire house, properly designed data tables are the foundation of a successful information engineering process.

In working with GeoSolve, you will observe a great initial effort to understand the real-world relationships of data, the translation of this to table designs, the documentation of data elements and the ongoing life-cycle preservation of proper design. These are all deliberate steps to ensure that:

• The application can grow over time, and that there are no limitations on what can be reported
• The accuracy and integrity of data is not compromised
• The performance of the database is not affected by high-volumes of data

Our trained software technologists are experts in designing and building theoretically normalized / relational databases. Equally important – we have the practical experience to know when to break the design rules in order to make an application run faster, or reduce interface development time. 

Application Development Technology

We use Microsoft SQL Server© as a database engine and administrative front-end. It is with SQL Server that we are best able to leverage the skills we have. While we use MS Access as a prototyping tool, we encourage all our customers to ultimately target the use of SQL Server. The free "express" versions of SQL Server makes the financial decision an easy one for our customers.

Structured Query Language (SQL) is the common language for retrieving and updating database content. Every one of our staff has strong SQL skills, with a couple of SQL geniuses thrown in for those more challenging data puzzles!

As far as possible, we build the ‘intelligence’ of the application into the table and stored procedure designs. We harness the power of SQL Server to:

• Ensure auto-validation of fields at the table level whenever possible
• Leverage stored procedures to encapsulate primary business rules
• Reuse views for standardizing common data select statements
• Implement index and relationship definitions to enforce unique or related data and ensure application performance
• Harness triggers to propagate data changes in related tables

Database Maintenance

Database Security

We pay special attention to database security and have a comprehensive understanding of SQL Server and MS Access security models. We have designed and delivered a range of different security implementations depending on our customer’s needs. We have a set of component based, pre-built solutions for implementation of multi-user accounts and controlling front-end user options based on back-end table permissions.

Automatic Backup / Database Consistency / Archiving

As part of any installation, we provide the initial configuration to handle these routine, but critical database maintenance tasks, and monitor the execution on a periodic basis.

SQL Server Replication

Our company has extensive experience in implementing complex SQL Server replications. Database replication is the processof creating and managing duplicate versions of a database. Replication not only copies a database but also synchronizes a set of replicas so that changes made to one replica are reflected in all the others. The beauty of replication is that it enables many users to work with their own local copy of a database but have the database updated as if they were working on a single, centralized database. For database applications where users are geographically distributed, replication can be a uniquely efficient method of providing data access.