Database Challenges in an Organization

Database Challenges in an Organization
Every organization faces a myriad of database challenges to fulfill their mission. These include:
Maximizing return on investment (ROI)
Managing Human Resources
Rapid deployment
Flexibility and maintainability
Scalability is nice, but secondary
Return on Investment (ROI) is Critical
Maximizing ROI is more critical than ever. Management demands tangible results for the expensive investments in database application development. And many database development efforts fail to yield the results they promise. Choosing the right technology and approach for each level in an organization is critical to maximizing ROI. This means choosing the best total return, which doesn't mean choosing the cheapest initial solution. This is often the most important decision a CIO/CTO makes.
Managing Human Resources
Managing people to customize technology is very challenging. The more complex the technology or application, the fewer people are qualified to handle it and the more expensive they are to hire. Turnover is always an issue, and having the right standards in place is critical to successfully supporting legacy applications. Training and keeping up with technology is also very challenging.
Rapid Deployment is Critical
Being able to create database applications quickly is important not only for reducing costs, but responding to internal or customer demands. The ability to create applications quickly provides a significant competitive advantage. The IT manager is responsible for offering alternatives and making tradeoffs to support the business needs of the organization. By using different technologies, you may be able to give the business decision makers choices such as a 60% solution in three months, a 90% solution in 12 months, or a 99% solution in 24 months (instead of months, it could be dollars). Sometimes time to market is most critical, other times it may be cost, and other times the features or security most important. Business changes quickly and is unpredictable. We live in a "good enough" rather than perfect world, so knowing how to deliver "good enough" solutions quickly gives you and your organization a competitive edge.
Flexibility and Maintainability is Important
Even with the best system design, by the time multi-month development efforts are completed, needs change. Versions follow versions, and a system that's designed to be flexible and able to accommodate change can mean the difference between success and failure for the users' careers.
Scalability is Necessary, but Often Secondary
Systems should be designed to manage the expected data and more. But many systems never get completed, get thrown away soon after use, or change so much over time that the initial assessments are often wrong. Scalability is nice, but this is often less important than having a solution quicker. If the application successfully supports growth, scalability can be added later when it's financially justified.
How to overcome these problems
sometimes a database can do the job better

If you need to make a list of anything, it’s tempting to see Excel as the default repository: after all, it’s only a small list of items for yourself or a few close colleagues.
Perhaps you need something more sophisticated – formulae for some calculations, or macro programming to automate the collection and processing of data. No problem: just type “=” to start writing a formula and Excel will be your guide.
Unfortunately, the ease with which you can start work in Excel or a rival spreadsheet program is also one of its problems. What starts as a small project in Excel grows and grows, until you’re left with a behemoth – at which point you could also be facing speed and stability issues, or even a development problem you just can’t solve.
Here, we examine the issues you can often come up against with spreadsheets, how you could possibly tackle them in Excel, and when you’d be better off taking the plunge and switching to a database instead.
1. Multi-user editing
When Excel systems grow organically, you quickly run into the problem that only one user can open a workbook at any one time. The second person to try to open the file is told it’s already open and that they can cancel, wait or view a read-only version. Excel’s promise to let you know when the other person closes the workbook is rather hollow, since it doesn’t check the status very often, and indeed it might never enlighten you. Even if it does, someone else might nip in and open the file before you.
There are three ways around this: you can use Excel Online, the cut-down, web-based version of Excel; you can turn on the Shared Workbooks feature; or you can split the data into several workbooks so that a different person can use each workbook without you all treading on each other’s toes.
2. Shared workbooks
Excel Online allows multiple editors by default, but it’s missing so much functionality that it isn’t really a contender for anything but the simplest tasks. Although its Shared Workbooks feature looks like it should do the job, it’s loaded with restrictions. You can’t create a table or delete a block of cells if the workbook is shared, for example.
There are workarounds for some restrictions – for others it’s a matter of changing the structure of the workbook, rather than using a workbook that’s already been set up – but they can get in the way. As a result, it can be impossible to use a shared workbook in the same way you might an ordinary, single-user workbook.
"When Excel systems grow organically, you run into the problem that only one user can open a workbook at any one time"
Changes in shared workbooks are synchronized between users each time the workbook is saved; this can be on a timed schedule, forcing a save every five minutes, for example. However, the overhead of regular saving and tracking every user’s changes is quite large: workbooks can easily balloon in size and put a strain on your network, slowing down other systems.
Shared workbooks are also fragile and prone to corruption. Microsoft is aware of the problem, but doesn’t seem to be doing much about the issue. It looks like it’s hoping Excel Online’s multi-authoring method will take over from the older shared workbook technology, but this won’t be a realistic proposition until the company removes all the restrictions and extends the multi-authoring technology to the full Excel desktop application, as it has with Word, PowerPoint and OneNote.
3. Linked workbooks
Splitting your data across multiple workbooks can provide a workaround to the problem of multi-user editing. But it’s likely these workbooks will need to have links between them so that values entered in one can be used in another. Links between workbooks are also useful for keeping logically separate data in separate files, rather than just separate sheets in one workbook.
Annoyingly, these links are another source of frustration and instability. They can be absolute, including the full path to the source workbook, or relative, including only the difference between the source and destination paths. Although this sounds sensible, Excel employs arcane rules to decide when to use each type of link and when to change them.