Data as a Service

Info 253A: Frontend Web Architecture

Kay Ashaolu

Why data storage?

• When we make a web request, where do we get the data from?
• When we create data, where do we put it?
• Where do "resources" live?

Example: bit.ly

• Lots of data to store
  • Shortcut to url mapping
  • Statistics about links
  • Information about users

Example: bit.ly

long url http://news.google.com
short url http://bit.ly/awekl
hit count 482240

long url http://facebook.com/user/profile
short url http://bit.ly/czasw
hit count 11023

long url http://msnbc.com/news/article/
short url http://bit.ly/olkjpl
hit count 1232
					

Data Storage Design

• What is the storage format?
• How do we lay out data?
• How do we access data?

Why use a file?

• http://news.google.com, http://bit.ly/awekl, 482240
• http://facebook.com/user/profile, http://bit.ly/czasw, 11023
• http://msnbc.com/news/article, http://bit.ly/olkjpl, 1232
• What are the pros and cons?

Problems with Files

• What if we want to add another field?
• What if we want to query different parts of data? How efficient is this?
• What if we have concurrent accesses?
• What data structures should we use?

Data Independence

• Databases: apps shouldn’t have to worry about these problems!
• Underlying storage format independent of application-level logic

Relational Data Stores

• RDBMS: Relational Database Management System
• Invented in the 1970s
• e.g., Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server

Relational Model

• Reason about sets of facts, or "tables"
• Each fact is a "row"
• Attributes are "columns" of row

NoSQL

• Different approach to data storage
• Simple but predictable data models
• Often have to build own features
• Designed for massive scale-out

Key-Value Store

Pros

• Simple API
• Easy to understand performance
• Easy to scale and use

Cons

• Simple API
• Must handle own schema management
• May need to manually implement search features

Document Store

• No predefined schema
• Store handles layout of arbitrary fields
• Examples: MongoDB, CouchDB, Cassandra, Redis

Front End

• Since we are on the front end, we don't normally deal with the database details
• What we really need is the ability to reach out to a service that gives us the capabilities of using a database
• Sounds like what we need is an API!

Google Firebase

• A NoSQL Cloud database that we can directly use with our React Applications
• Provides an API to save JSON data to the cloud
• Gives us the ability to save, access, and search data outside of the confines of our application
• We can write our front end code in React, and use API's to provide the functionality we need without a webserver

Questions