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
put(key, value);
let value = get(key);

Document Store

{
	"long_url": "http://www.google.com",
	"short_url": "qwelmw",
	"hit_count": 2
}
  • 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