Ten Ways Databases Run Your Life

You might not realize it, but databases are everywhere. Whether or not you know very much about them, their effect on our daily lives is extensive. From weather applications to the movies you watch online, databases are responsible for many of the services we utilize daily.

We have collected a few of the more well-known examples of how databases enhance your day-to-day life below. The most popular database server in our industry, MySQL, is prevalent in virtually every example listed below.

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1. Online Television Streaming

Any online streaming service, such as Hulu or Netflix, uses databases to generate a list of TV shows and movies to watch. The database tracks an individual’s show preferences, and provide a list of recommended viewing.

The power required to analyze such an enormous amount of data is done through highly-specialized database management technology, such as Cassandra. In fact, Hulu has recently been relying heavily on Apache Cassandra.

2. Social Gaming

Gaming done across social networks is extremely data intensive. Gathering individual player information from around the globe and serving it to players on demand requires a high availability database software.

One example is the popular Game of Thrones Ascent, a free role-playing game launched by Disruptor Beam and based on the hit HBO series, Game of Thrones. Their Percona Server-based database solution helps eliminates data bottlenecks during high-usage periods.

3. Personal Cloud Storage

If you save photos or documents to your smartphone or tablet, it’s likely your data is stored in “the cloud,” a large, central storage environment with a small portion dedicated just to you.

Syncing this data across your devices requires powerful databases able to call up your data at a moment’s notice, wherever you are.

4. Sports

Fan participation in national sports doesn’t just utilize the power of the database, it depends upon it. From fantasy football leagues to March Madness brackets, they all depend on huge databases full of player statistics. This includes game performances, injury reports, and more, all calculating the odds of a win on a weekly basis.

5. Finances

From the stock market to your local bank, databases are abundant across the financial world. Tracking the vast amount of information behind the world’s daily transactions requires extremely powerful databases. This includes financial models that analyze that data to predict future activity.

6. Government Organizations

Government organizations around the world are constantly collecting data for research, defense, legislation, and humanitarianism purposes, to name a few. This data is collected, stored and analyzed using powerful and far-reaching database services.

7. Social Media

Every social media platform stores reams of user information in databases used to recommend friends, businesses, products, and topics to the end user. This cross-referencing of data is immensely complex and uses highly reliable and capable database software. For example, MySQL is used in Facebook data centers.

8. eCommerce

Any online organization that sells its products or services uses databases. This includes activities such as organizing their products, pricing information, and user purchase history. The eCommerce store owner can then recommend other potential products to customers using platforms such as WooCommerce.

This data is stored in highly secure databases, protected by the standards set through PCI Compliance.

9. Healthcare

Doctor’s offices and healthcare organizations, among others, store extensive amounts of patient data for easy accessibility. The databases behind this collection of information are large and complex and secure protected data. This is in compliance with HIPAA standards.

Healthcare.gov relies on a NoSQL database to manage their health insurance information. Cassandra is one such example of a NoSQL database software.

10. Weather

Predicting the weather across the globe is incredibly complex. The predictions depend on a myriad of factors, all gathered, stored and analyzed within databases. This allows the data to be ready to deliver today’s weather to your local TV station or smartphone app.

The Weather Company, for example, takes in over 20 terabytes of data per day. The company has used a number of databases to support this data, including MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Cassandra, and more.

We have Databases too!

Our VPS Hosting (Virtual Private Servers) and traditional Dedicated Server solutions are two perfect examples of products that also run on databases. They are designed specifically for entrepreneurial businesses, developers, freelancers, and digital agencies.