One of the biggest technical challenges of inventory management is keeping data consistent in real time, or as close to it as possible. Particularly with larger operations, this is vital to avoid “overselling” scenarios that can cost the company money or damage its reputation.

Charlie Custer

February 3, 2025

In the context of a database and how it’s organized, the term database schema describes the structure of the data and how the elements within the database relate to each other. This information is often presented visually with diagrams that illustrate how different tables and elements connect and to give you a logical view of the entire database. However, the schema itself exists in the database as the coded rules that define the data’s structure and relationships.

Charlie Custer

January 27, 2025

In the world of finance, changing databases is usually pretty rare. When you’re in charge of other people’s money — several trillion dollars of it, in the case of one of the banks discussed in this article — even small changes could represent major risks. That’s why even today, many banks still run systems based on legacy relational databases such as Oracle, IBM, and PostgreSQL — often the same databases they were using 10 or even 20 years ago.

Charlie Custer

January 16, 2025

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are like the Superbowl for retailers. Instead of point spreads, though, e-commerce companies are betting on peak sales numbers. But while the deluge of deals evokes dreams of dollars for CEOs, the surging site traffic can be more of a nightmare for CTOs. The onslaught of shoppers puts huge amounts of stress on their application architecture. In this scenario, even a minor problem with inventory management can cause major consequences.

Charlie Custer

November 7, 2024

Everybody, from banking applications to retailers to SaaS applications, deals with payment processing. But architecting a system that can deal with payments at scale is challenging.

Charlie Custer

May 8, 2024

Metadata management is a critical part of any business application. Let’s take a quick look at what metadata is, why it’s important, and how you can architect your application to ensure highly available, consistent metadata at scale.

Charlie Custer

April 30, 2024

What are the advantages and disadvantages of managed database-as-a-service offerings, and why should you consider letting someone else operate your database?

Charlie Custer

February 1, 2024