The Database Management Systems

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Social Media

By the definition given by the Wikipedia, "Social media refers to the means of interactions among people in which they create, share, and exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks" [1] . Social media has different improved aspects rather than traditional media has. Quality, reach, frequency, usability, immediacy and permanence are the main key aspects that available with the social media. It provides those aspects while allowing to create, share and exchange information. Also it needs support of virtual community tools and integration tools with contents such as promoting, sharing, re-stating, highlighting, co-creating, contributing, committing, exchanging, etc.

Therefore social media represented on highly interactive platforms with support of mobile, desktop and web based technologies. Also social media must have super-fast highly interactive core platform to provide services to communicate among end user terminals.

Web 1.0 is not enough to provide such highly interactive services because of its own limitations to support above key features. Therefore Web 2.0 takes place in implementation of the Social media platforms because it provides ideological and technological foundations to implement key features of social media.

Web 2.0

In technologically Web 2.0 provides various new aspects in both client side and server side of web application. Web 1.0 limited to capabilities of stateless web protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, RSTP, etc. But with Web 2.0 applications, both client and server side communications become real-time and therefore it is possible to communicate and invoke server side services without making page navigations or reloads. Anyway Web 2.0 also use above stateless protocols in Web 1.0. But it gained new capabilities by support with Ajax and JavaScript frameworks.

When user send a request to server side with using Web 1.0, he/she would have to wait for the data to come back from server. But in Web 2.0, data requests going to the server are not block user interaction until response received because separated from data coming back to the page. This is known as asynchronous communication. So with the asynchronous communication user can still interact with the page and can made another requests.

The data fetched from server response is typically in XML or JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format. These formats are natively supported by JavaScript. Therefore programmer can easily use them to transmit structured data between client and server side. Also programmer can use Document Object Model (DOM) to dynamically update the web page based on the new data.

With support of those Web 2.0 technologies it is possible to create highly interactive social media applications. For example, Google Docs use those technique to create a Web based document processor. Google doc can edit, view, comment and share within permitted parties while having different levels of sharing permissions and rights. Also interacted people can chat within same document window and edit document concurrently.

Database management systems

The highly interacted social media platform not only depend on the Web 2.0. It needs powerful database management systems to handle big data, concurrency, and transaction control. Also database recovery options are more important against any disaster. The big data centers is not centralized its data and they use database replication and clustering for better reliability and performance.

Most applications use single centralized database and it only performs single transaction at time. But since social media are highly interactive, it needs to do multiple transactions simultaneously. Also those databases connected to multiple users concurrently with different levels of permissions. Therefore normal relational database systems cannot deliver those requirements and should have to use NoSQL (Not Only SQL) databases. NoSQL databases such as "Apache Cassandra" can use for deliver highly interactive requirements in social media. Also it is free of charge and only has the setup and operation cost. Facebook used Cassandra as their primary database engine until 2012. E-bay, twitter and cisco use Cassandra as their NoSQL database currently.

In technically NoSQL database not only keep relational data. It also maps relational data into de-normalized from to provide fast access to data. Database replicated its data between cluster nodes to provide high availability and fault tolerance. Also when database cluster updated with data, database engine takes responsibility about automatic data replication among all data centers. Therefore within few seconds updated data will available in all clusters.

Those database clusters connected to web application through a load balancer. Load balancer takes responsibility to distribute transaction requests among database clusters. Therefore it is possible to minimize overloading a single node. Also caching provides subsequent data immediately without querying again. Therefore users can access their unchanged regular data very quickly.

With support of NoSQL database engines it is possible to provide highly interactive database solutions that required for social media. As example, when we post status in to Facebook, other users can view, share, comment and like it. But those tasks are limited only to some users in according to their relative permission level according to publisher’s perspective. When accessing post by different users, Facebook application needs to connect multiple users in to database and perform simultaneous transactions according to their permission level. Also if any database cluster failed, load balancer can distribute transaction traffic among functioning nodes. Therefore user never experience about node failure.

Apply Social Media into company

In business level social media can used to empower the productivity of an organization by integrating inter organization communications, documentations, meetings etc. in to social media platform. Most of inter organizational communications are currently done by e-mails, face to face meetings, telephone calls and faxes. But those de-centralized media doesn’t synchronize with each other and therefore employees need to keep separate records about them if necessary.

Employees shared their documents via e-mail. But if someone needs to change document content of comment something, he/she needs to download document and made changes. Afterwards the document should e-mail again to all recipients. Let’s imagine if 100 of people refer particular document and that document revised 20 times, all of 100 employees will received same parent document 20 times with small revisions. So if someone needs to find revised changes, he/she may have to go through entire 20 documents.

Sometimes employees have to go far away from office and they need to communicate face to face with peoples in the office. Currently it is not possible to do such online conference or meeting without any support of video conferencing tools. Also in some cases, it is necessary to collect employees’ feedback and comments about it. But currently there are no way to get employees’ ideas without calling a meeting and performing a poll.

Social media can solve all of those problems because of its own characteristics that described earlier. Employees can arrange events, meetings and through the social media. And they can select only specific group if necessary. Also with text, voice and video chat, employees can connect each other and can communicate without using de-centralized media. Google hangout, Facebook chat are good real world examples for that kind of scenarios. Also online meetings, multi-party conferences can arrange through the social media.

Employee do not want to mess with tons of emails since social media can provide simultaneous document editors such as Google Doc and Microsoft Office 360. They can simultaneously edit, view and comment single document through the social media. Also users can view document revisions and differences between each revisions easily. Different permission levels will help to prevent unauthorized views, modifications and comments.

Also employees can post a small state like tweet about their works and others can comment their ideas, suggestions along with that post. So employee can get comments from coworkers while performing a job.

Conclusion

In according to Web 2.0 technologies and database technologies, social media will be a secured, safe, consistent and highly available medium that can be used for empower the organization efficiency and productivity.