Idea for app but need ability to store a Database online

veryangryman

Hi, as per the subject, i thought i'd a half decent idea for an app. I can code it, update the DB locally etc. However, obviously the users would be distributed and be updating/reading the live database each use (if it ever worked).

Can anyone recommend a beginners guide to how to set up a Database on on online web server. Books/links or anything would be cool

John_Mc

veryangryman wrote: »

Hi, as per the subject, i thought i'd a half decent idea for an app. I can code it, update the DB locally etc. However, obviously the users would be distributed and be updating/reading the live database each use (if it ever worked).

Can anyone recommend a beginners guide to how to set up a Database on on online web server. Books/links or anything would be cool

You need to implement an API exposed through web services. I'd suggest using REST to do this as there's less overhead in getting it up and running.

You could also use something like Azure Mobile Services

jobless

veryangryman wrote: »

Hi, as per the subject, i thought i'd a half decent idea for an app. I can code it, update the DB locally etc. However, obviously the users would be distributed and be updating/reading the live database each use (if it ever worked).

Can anyone recommend a beginners guide to how to set up a Database on on online web server. Books/links or anything would be cool

you could take a look at https://www.firebase.com/how-it-works.html

set up a free account and play around with it.... if you google im sure you will find blogs where people have set it up

Talisman

How big is your database likely to be?

Services such as AppFog will give you a small database and a scalable application platform for $20 per month. You'll have to write an API to serve the database content to your app.

If the database is very small and read-only for the app then you could get by using a static file hosted on a CDN. I've seen this implementation before - the CDN hosts 2 files: The data file and a text file. The text file contains the date that the data was last updated. The app periodically reads the content of the text file, if the date has changed it downloads the new version of the data file. With this configuration you can ftp the database to the CDN and update the text file when it's in place.

Skrynesaver

Amazon's RDB is a popular option for commercial projects.

bpmurray

You need a place to run the DB from and potentially running analytics on the captured data , so it makes sense to use a PaaS offering - I think IBM's Bluemix is free for startups, but usage is metered anyway so you wouldn't typically pay anything until you had an active customer base. Whichever you use, you can usually deploy an instance of pretty much any DB available from the very scalable Oracle, DB2 and Postgres, through the medium sized MySQL or SQL Server to the small like Derby. Of course, they all offer NoSQL databases too but don't make the common assumpttion that they're somehow better/faster than a RDBMS. To retrieve the data, use REST as has been suggested above. In fact, you can create a REST service literally in about 2 minutes using NodeRED which is often available on PaaS - that's what I've been using recently and it works flawlessly.