Something to consider before using a relational storage as a service for your app

If you are planning on using any one of the great services available these days that let you store, retrieve, update and delete (perform CRUD operations) your relational data (geographic or not) using a HTTP API, here is something that you might need to consider. There are multiple services that allow you to do this these days. Some of these services are Google FusionTables, ArcGIS Online, CartoDB, ArcGIS Server 10 and up etc. Even though the backend storage for Google FusionTables is not relational, the service presents a relational facade to user by allowing tables to be merged etc.

All these services allow you to perform CRUD operations on your data over HTTP. This makes things really easy for front end developers since they can perform CRUD operations right from javascript and maybe just using the web server as a proxy relaying requests to the storage service.

But one of the things it takes away from us is the ability to perform multiple CRUD operations as one atomic unit. That is, let us assume that we have a polygon layer in our ArcGIS Server map service which also contains a table which contains attribute data related (one to many) to the polygon layer data. In this case, if one of our requirements is to update attribute data in a single polygon layer table row AND one or more rows with related data in the standalone attribute data which either succeed or fail together as a unit, then this becomes very hard to accomplish (if it is possible to do so). That is, we could end up with cases where the polygon layer table does get updated, but the update operations on the related table fails due to one of many possible reasons. This may allow bad data to be stored in the database with loss of data integrity.

Non-relational storage services are more resistant to this drawback since the data structure design for those databases expect us to handle this during design based on how the app uses the data being stored.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions on this issue, please leave a comment.

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