The company is China's leading provider of high-quality housing product development and comprehensive lifestyle services. It has achieved outstanding performance in 2022, with sales and market share ranking among the top five in the country. The business covers real estate development, real estate construction, urban renewal, technological decoration and other fields.
In 2023, the company reached a cooperation with Jiuzhang Shunshu (Zhejiang) Technology Co., Ltd. to manage all the group's databases through Jiuzhang Shunshu's "NineData Database Management Platform".
"After using the NineData platform, the company has achieved unified management of the entire group's databases, unified database access and changes of dozens of suppliers, and made the business more stable, secure and standardized. "——Head of Group Database
1. Challenges faced by customers
The company's database infrastructure has more than 50 business systems and hundreds of database instances, covering order systems, commodity operations, marketing systems, financial systems, OA systems, messaging platforms, APP systems, etc., with hundreds of databases running every day. developers and 20 service providers connect to the database through direct connections for daily business operations.
1.1 Challenges brought by direct database connection
For such large enterprises, there are many cooperative service providers. These service providers and developers within the group directly access the enterprise database through direct connection. Due to the differences in professional experience of each developer, it is easy to lead to inefficient SQL or Misoperation occurs, and once such a situation occurs, it will directly affect the stability of the core database, resulting in the unavailability of key business libraries.
Since the accounts used for direct connection databases are usually divided according to departments, that is, all members of a department use the same account, it is difficult to distinguish which person the SQL execution comes from, and auditing is very difficult. At the same time, permissions cannot be customized based on each person's responsibilities, and there is a risk that irrelevant personnel will have changed permissions.
It is also difficult to effectively manage changes in database permissions caused by new personnel, transfers, and resignations.
1.2 Challenges brought by the lack of database development specifications
Since the enterprise has many service providers, developers have different experiences and habits, and they may use different database design patterns, naming rules, data types, etc. This can lead to cluttered database structures, data redundancy, and data consistency issues. These problems will directly make the database difficult to maintain, which not only increases operation and maintenance costs, but also affects business efficiency, forming a vicious circle.
The company has also tried to promote production database specifications through training, emails, etc. However, due to the lack of an enforcement mechanism, even if developers understand the development specifications, they will inevitably operate the database according to their past habits. Therefore, this method is difficult to promote within the enterprise and among all service providers.
1.3 Challenges brought by the lack of a unified database management platform
The company uses multiple types of databases to cope with different business scenarios, including MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, PolarDB, Oracle, SQL Server, etc. At the same time, a multi-cloud business system was built using local IDC and multiple different cloud platforms. However, there is a lack of a unified platform to access these databases. Developers need to learn and use a variety of different database clients to ensure the development and operation of different databases, which greatly increases their workload.
Solutions provided by NineData
NineData provided the enterprise with a comprehensive set of database management services, including fine-grained permission control, audit logs, SQL development specifications, approval processes, multi-platform and multi-database type support, etc., helping them achieve more efficient and secure database management. .
2.1 Solution architecture diagram
Architecture diagram of solutions provided by NineData to customers
2.2 Database connection: change from 100 to 1
NineData supports more than 50 data sources and multiple mainstream cloud vendors. The company's developers no longer need to remember the connection information of each database, but can uniformly access databases of all types and platforms through the NineData platform. This greatly simplifies the database access process, improves developers' work efficiency, and improves the stability of the core database to a great extent.
2.3 Authority control: from department to individual
The NineData SQL development platform provides fine-grained permission management functions. The enterprise's administrators can easily manage the permission system of all employees of the enterprise, and conveniently recover and allocate database permissions in scenarios such as the addition, transfer, and resignation of personnel. This prevents the entire department from sharing one account and prevents unauthorized personnel from accessing sensitive data.
2.4 Audit log: from difficult backtracking to precise alignment
NineData's SQL auditing capability will record the operations of everyone in the platform at any time. No matter who performed what action at what time, it can be easily located.
2.5 Unified release: from thousands of people to standardization
SQL development specifications are an important feature of the NineData SQL development platform. It has more than 100 built-in database specifications, covering everything from database query updates and structural changes to platform-level operational restrictions. SQL rules are configured by the administrator, and all database changes need to be published through the NineData SQL development platform. During this period, if there are any changes that do not comply with the rules, they will be intercepted in real time to ensure that all changes comply with the specifications.
Successfully achieved unified management of the entire group’s database
By introducing the NineData platform, the company successfully achieved unified management of the entire group's databases, improving the security and standardization of database access and changes. This not only improves business stability, but also reduces management and operating costs, allowing companies to better focus on business growth and customer satisfaction.