INFORMIX-SQL 7.32 (SE) Linux Pawnshop App.
I have some users who own several pawnshops within a 100-mile radius. Each pawnshop app runs with SE. The only functionality these owners need are: ability to remotely login to any store in order to view transactions, running totals and consolidate daily totals at end of business day. This can be accomplished with dialup modems, as the app doesnt have any need for displaying BLOB’s. At end-of-day, each stores totals are unloaded to a flat file and transferred to the owner’s system.
What would my owners gain by converting to distributed db’s?.. ability to find out if a stores customer has conducted business in another store or if another store has a desired inventory item for sale? (not important, seldomly happens). Most customers will usually do business with the same store and if they dont have a desired item for sale, they will visit the closest competitors pawnshop. What gains would distributed db’s offer to accomplish the same functionality as described in the first paragraph?.. Pawnshop owners absolutely refuse to connect their production systems via the internet! They dont trust its security, even using VPN, Cisco, etc, or its reliability! In this part of the world, ISP’s have a bad track record for uptime. I know of several apps which have converted from web to dialup because of comm problems!
If you are not going to have general 90%+ uptime connection between the databases, then there isn’t any benefit to distributed databases.
One main benefit is to give large businesses a ‘failover’ when one machine goes down or is unavailable. If they have the database distributed over three or four machines, then the loss of one doesn’t impact their ability to do business.
A second major benefit is when a database is simply too big for one server to cope with. ‘Internet scale’ databases (Amazon, Twitter, etc) have that level of traffic. Walmart would have that level of traffic. A couple of storefront operations wouldn’t.