Op-Ed: The Importance of a Reliable Database

I've decided to take a break from the reviews and do a little op-ed piece on databases. I've recently been doing a little experimenting myself with MySQL and experimenting with my own GoDaddy account. The software MySQL makes setting up a database for storing data and information so easy on a personal site, but I guess that doesn't ensure reliability/stability for your site. I guess the point I'm getting at is the need to establish a reliable database before releasing a website/web-based product that will easily generate a lot of traffic.

This morning, I woke up at 6:55am to attempt to get a ticket to the talk with Bill Clinton at Zellerbach Auditorium about the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He is coming to talk about Global Citizenship: Turning Good Intentions into Positive Action. As good an orator as Bill Clinton is, I obviously wanted to jump on the opportunity of seeing him. Throughout the day before the ticket release, I was consistently barraged with automated emails from campus-wide email lists, department-based email lists, and even from a friend in D.C. that had heard about it before any news came out. Obviously, with all these emails, there was a lot of anticipation for being one of the 2000 people that can fit into Zellerbach. At 7:00am EXACTLY, I clicked the link to sign up for a ticket. Error. I tried again, was it my connection? No. I knew there would be a lot of traffic for the site, but really, enough to block EVERYONE from being able to look at the site? I was sitting with a couple people who were also simultaneously trying to log on, certainly bogging down the system. After multiple error messages (counting 5 different errors), we all go the message - this site had reached max capacity. At around 7:30, a short window was open to all the people trying to get in. The people that were lucky enough to refresh/had a good connection were directed to a Wufoo website, essentially a site that mimics the capabilities of Google Forms. I, unfortunately, was one of the many students that were denied a ticket to something I had spent 1 hour clicking "F5" for. Hey, you win some, you lose some.

My major qualm was the lack of preparedness on the part of the webmaster. WHY would not not prepare for such an event? Did you want to torture us all? My reasoning behind this was, open at 7:00am, as promised, and allow your website to host the multiple site requests from students at Berkeley. I felt like I had been ripped off. Secondly, why use Wufoo, a website that didn't have a trusted database to handle that many requests at once. Hello, Google Docs? I'm sure Google Docs would have been able to take care of the traffic much better than Wufoo. I think this speaks back to the early days of Twitter's "Fail Whale," which still occurs when the entire world wants to tweet about a global issue, recently this was Farah Fawcett and Michael Jackson. In any case, the event webmaster should have better prepared for this and chosen appropriate services to host the campus-wide event, which would helped to ensure fairness in the ticket distribution process (first come first serve). [It may be attributed to the fact that Berkeley IST servers have less than 5GB memory, and unable to handle this, but I'd rather blame the webmaster for not choosing Google Docs to support the forms].

This incident has really shed some light on the importance of a reliable and high capacity database. All websites that expect large amounts of traffic and high frequency page visits, a database (back-end developer) is just as important as your "look and feel." That is all.

Posted via email from boochikan's posterous