Data, Databases, and Design

Data is the foundation of almost all web and mobile applications, and databases are required to handle the essence of your business. There are several database options to choose from, depending on the nature of your business, as well as its type, format, and structure of data, and other design considerations and dependencies of your business and data, on the cloud or otherwise.

Starting with the foundations of databases and design, this book covers fundamentals of database design, data's types, structure, and applications on the cloud, and designing the cloud database model for your application. This will involve us demonstrating database modeling with real-world use cases and examples and integration with other layers of the tech stack like applications, runtimes, analytics and other services such as monitoring, security, access control, analytics, machine learning, and generative AI. The cloud databases and services we will be using to exercise these concepts are all from Google Cloud.

By the end of this book, you'll have learned the fundamentals of cloud database design, taken the data to AI design journey and will have experimented with hands-on applications using Cloud databases and storage options like Cloud SQL, Spanner, Firestore, BigQuery and Cloud Storage. In summary, this book prepares you for designing the data, databases, and data to AI stacks of your product or application with practical examples and hands-on design considerations.

In this chapter, you’ll learn about the considerations that are critical in choosing a database at different stages in the life cycle of your data. We will cover the different stages, types, formats, structures and categories of data, types of databases, and the business and technical aspects of database design.

We’ll cover the following topics in this chapter:

• Basics of data modeling and design
• Types of data and applications
• Business aspects of data
• Technical considerations
• Types of databases
• Choosing the right database