Mark Solda

Strategy • Database Administration • Disaster Recovery • Cross Team Collaboration • 24x7 Production Support

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When working at a financial software company, the company wanted to move from providing the software only as local installations at a client's site, but to also provide the software over the Internet in an Application Service Provider (ASP) model.  This would mean the company would have to have a database environment for each client with the appropriate security, space, performance, expandaiblity and realibility.  It would also have to support an unlimited growth of clients.

The final design for the applilcation to be deployed in an ASP environment called for a database of data maintained by the company (a "shared" database) and each client needed their own database. (a "client" database)  The ASP started out with a single client, one "shared" and one "client" database.  As the environment grew, new database servers needed to be added, necessitating its own replicated copy of a "shared" database.

The ASP environment grew to support hundreds of clients, a simllar number of databases and dozens of database servers.  Since the databases in the disaster recovery site were maintained via replication, the supporting replication environment grews to dozens of servers as well.  All this brought the need for scripts to generate replication definitions and subscriptions in resposne to new database installations and database schema changes.  

Proper planning and constant inovation helped the ASP environment grow in size and complexity, helping to bring in more revenue for the company.