Database Design: Things to Consider

I started this one when I was unemployed last month.

By no means is the list exhaustive, just some of the things I think of when planning out my design.

What kind of data? If you’re going to be storing BLOBs of any sort, you may need a lot of space. Work with your DBA to figure out a plan.

How much data? Are you a telecom doing thousands of transactions per second? A non-profit doing 100 transactions a day? Somewhere in between?

Who are your customers? Will this be public facing? Internal only?

How will you handle security? Database Authentication? Roll your own table based authentication? If it’s a web based application, it’s probably easier to roll your own as it’s a stateless environment. If you’re doing a client/server application, Database Authentication is probably the best way to go as you won’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Can you use VPD or Application Contexts?

What type of keys? Will you stick to one method and use surrogate keys for everything? Natural keys for everything? Or a mix of both?

What version of Oracle?

Encryption?Will you need columnar encryption (SSN, Credit Card Numbers, etc)? Transparent Data Encryption?

Coming from the end-user world, I tend to start with reports. What kind of information do you need to retrieve from your data? I think that is the most important thing actually. For without good information, what's the point?

Anyway, feel free to add your own. What are some of things you consider whilst designing your database?