Database table structure Guidance - sql-server

I am trying to build a web application that enables users to refer people to the site. A user can refer up to 10 people to the site and can have up to 7 generations, meaning that each person referred to the system by a referred user will be related to the immediate referrer and the other user that referred the newly registered user’s referrer, up to the seventh level.
The diagram below will help give a view of what I mean.
I'm using SQL Server 2008 for my database.

This is impossible to answer in general because the answer depends on what kind of queries you plan to run against your data.
But there are many alternatives for how to store hierarchical data in a database. You can start with Implementing a hierarchical data structure in a database.
If that's not enough, Google is your friend

Related

SQL Server copy data across databases

I'm using SQL Server 2019. I have a "MasterDB" database that is exposed to GUI application.
I'm also going to have as many as 40 user database like "User1DB", "User2DB", etc. And all these user databases will have "exact same" schema and tables.
I have a requirement to copy tables data (overwriting target) from one user database (let's say "User1DB") to the other (say "User2DB"). I need to do this from within "MasterDB" database since the GUI client app going to have access to only this database. How to handle this dynamic situation? I'd prefer static SQL (in form of Stored Procedures) rather than dynamic SQL.
Any suggestion will greatly be appreciated. Thanks.
Check out this question here for transferring data from one database to another.
Aside from that, I agree with #DaleK here. There is no real reason to have a database per user if we are making the assumption that a user is someone who is logging into your frontend app.
I can somewhat understand replicating your schema per customer if you are running some multi-billion record enterprise application where you physically have so much data per customer that it makes sense to split it up, but based on your question that doesn't seem to be the case.
So, if our assumptions are correct, you just need to have a user table, where your fields might be...
UserTable
UserId
FName
LName
EmailAddress
...
Edit:
I see in the comments you are referring to "source control data" ... I suggest you study up on databases and how they're meant to be designed, implemented, and how data should be transacted. There are a ton of great articles and books out there on this with a simple Google search.
If you are looking to replicate your data for backup purposes, look into some data warehouse design principles, maybe creating a separate datastore in a different geographic region for that. The latter is a very complex subject to which I can't go over in this answer, but it sounds like that goes far beyond your current needs. My suggestion is to backtrack and hash out the needs for your application, while understanding some of the fundamentals of databases (or different methods of storing data). Implement something and then see where it can be expanded upon / refactored.
Beyond that, I can't be more detailed than the original question you posted. Hope this helps.

Designing databases and applications for hosted / cloud solutions

Are there any resources available that can guide someone on how to 'think' about the various components of a hosted / cloud solution before going ahead and starting to make a hosted application? If that made no sense, what I mean to ask is are there any guidance books/websites on what things need to be considered when making a cloud application?
I am attempting to make a hosted CRM-style software application that will serve many hundreds of customers. The application is powered by a SQL server database with many tables and a ColdFusion, HTML5, CSS, Javascript front-end. If I was installing this application and its components at each client site, then each installation is unique to that customer. But somehow I have to replicate this uniqueness in the cloud which is baffling me.
Only two things have come to mind so far:
The need for a unique database per customer in SQL server
The need to change DB connection strings per customer in the web application
My thought process has come to a block when I am trying to envisage how to design the application to serve so many different customers. Even though the application that all customers use will is the same (same DB tables, same front-end), the data that they store and retrieve will be specific to them. So I was thinking that surely each customer needs a separate database creating for them? Is it feasible to create a replica database for each customer? If I need to update some tables or add a new table, how would I do this for hundreds of different databases?
From the front-end I guess each unique customer log-in would change DB connection strings so that they can only access their database. Other than this I can't think of anything else that needs to change per customer basis.
When a new customer wants to sign up, it needs to be clear to me what I need to create for them to have access to the application. I guess this is ultimately what I need to think of but I'm stuck.
If anyone can suggest some things to think of or if there is a book or website on this kind of thing that someone could point me to I'd really be very thankful.
EDIT:
I was looking at an article about Salesforce.com and it says
"In order to ensure privacy of data for each user and give an effect of each having their own database, the data from different users are securely isolated from one another."
Anyone know how this is achieved or how it may be done?
Found some great information here. It is called multi-tenant database design and seems to be a common topic. Once I get the database designed then the application can sit nicely on top.
https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/1043/what-problems-will-i-get-creating-a-database-per-customer

Standard practice/API for sharing database data without giving direct database access

We would like to give some of our customers the option to read data from our central database. The data is live and new records are being added every few seconds. Our database is MySQL running on Amazon RDS.
I was wondering what is the common practice for doing so.
One option would be to give them select right from specific tables, in that case they would be able to access other customers' data as well.
I have tried searching for database, interface, and API key words and some other key words, but I couldn't find a good answer.
Thanks!
Use REST for exposing specific tables to do CRUD operations. You can control the access on it too.

Which database does Youtube use at the moment?

I hope anyone can help me out in this topic, even if it's not a specific programming question.
I'm writing a bachelor thesis, where I compare MySQL to MongoDB and I want to write something about Youtube, as the platform has to handle many requests with heavy dataload.
The only good resource which I found was this video: Seattle Conference on Scalability: YouTube Scalability
As the conference was in 2007, I can imagine there were some updates regarding to the database.
The last information that I have from this talk is that the thumbnails are stored in a BigTable database and the metadata in MySQL. Are there any changes since then?
Where are the videos stored? Is there an entry in the MySQL table, which refers to the stored video?
Thanks in advance for the answer!
According to this, youtube still uses mysql: http://code.google.com/p/vitess/wiki/ProjectGoals
I am not sure of how things are at youtube but I am in process of developing a similar application for our client. So what we are doing is we are making the use of best of both worlds i.e SQL and NoSQL..
We store the videos on disk and store the path to these videos in MySQL db table. Then we have a separate table which holds the genre and video mapping i.e which video belongs to which particular genre.
Today with vast of pool of user data we are in position to leverage upon these data like we had never been before, so you see things are now way different then 2007 and with the popularity and dependency of people on internet when it comes to sites like you tube we have vast set of unstructured data which if used properly can give you great results. So in our project we store the site admin and reporting stuff like user db, video locations and genre mapping etc in MySQL and store the unstructured data about user interaction in NoSQL database. We then use the NoSQL data to do all the analytics and give appropriate results to the user.
They are using mysql with Bigdata.
The user information such has who uploaded the file,file information all will be stored in mysql and data will be stored in Bigdata.
I think they are using database that can use FileTable

Software as a service - Database

If I am building a CRM web application to sell as a membership service, what is the best method to design and deploy the database?
Do I have 1 database that houses 100s of records per table or deploy multiple databases for different clients?
Is it really an issue to use a single database since I believe sites like Flickr use them?
Multiple clients is called "multi-tenant". See for example this article "Multi-Tenant Data Architecture" from Microsoft.
In a situation like a CRM system, you will probably need to have separate instances of your database for each customer.
I say this because if you'd like larger clients, most companies have security policies in place regarding customer data. If you store their customer data in the same database as another customer, you're running the risk of exposing one companies confidential data to another company (a competitor, etc.).
Sites like Flickr don't have to worry about this as much since the majority of us out on the Interwebs don't have such strict policies regarding our personal data.
Long term it is easiest to maintain one database with multiple clients' data in it. Think about deployment, backup, etc. However, this doesn't keep you from having several instances of this database, each containing a subset of the full client dataset. I'd recommend to grow the number of databases after you have established the usefulness/desirability of your product. Having complex infrastructure is not necessary if you have no traffic....
So, I'd just put a client id in the relevant tables and smile when client 4 comes in and the extent of your new deployment is one insert statement.

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