What are the most critical changes and/or trends taking place in the design and implementations of database applications today?

What are the most critical changes and/or trends taking place in the design and implementations of database applications today?

The most critical changes that are taking place in the design and implementation of databases are related to the security of these databases. Data stored in databases that may be present online or offline is at a constant threat from hacker and other attackers. The first step towards an improvement in the database security is sought through legal covers. New laws are introduce to punish those who threat the security of information in databases. Secondly, the design of the database itself is going through a constant upgradation to counter threats. For example new privilege systems are introduced inside databases. For example Xmandroid is a database security system that is used to mitigate privilege escalation attacks in android systems (Bugie, Davi, Dmitrienko, Fischer & Sadeghi, 2011).

Data modeling is another issues addressed in the new improved database applications. The basic idea in the design of database applications is to improve the data models such that relations between different variables in a database more easy to implement and manageable (Johnson, 1997). There are huge databases with literally hundreds of different data variables. These variable are related to each other. Defining these relations is a big problem as they might be complex. The aim is to resolve this complexity with better database designs.

The actual amount of data that can be stored in a database is also an issue of concern. We often hear of website hosting crashing due to unexpected amount of traffic. One of the reason is because the databases, mostly SQL at the back end of these websites are not capable of responding to online visitor’s queries when they exceed a threshold. This causes these databases to crash. Modern database application developers are addressing this issue by extending the capacity of a database to respond to huge amounts of request from the user end.

Success has also been achieved to enable databases to generate responses without the user request. This happens on many occasions in these days. Remember the automatic updating of scores on sports websites without a page refresh? This is only possible as the databases generate responses without use intervention.