Enterprise Rails

Operations and Reporting

When you launch your website, it will be the primary (probably the only) consumer of your database. All of the queries your database handles will be related to making your app go. If everything goes well, you’ll have lots of users and you’ll start collecting and generating lots of data about those users and your website’s operation in general.

Around this time, the business development team will start asking you questions. How many new users join your site each day? Each hour? Is there a geographic distribution to your user base? What features are heavily used and which go unused? How many repeat visitors did you have last week, and what was the revenue result of the costly marketing campaign?

The natural thing to do to answer these questions is to start building reports. You add a report that breaks down new visitors and repeat visitors by day and hour. You add a report that shows access by state—perhaps plotting hits on a U.S. and world map. You add a report that shows revenue events as they relate to different traffic sources—external links versus unreferred traffic versus links from your email campaign. You add more and more reports almost as quickly as your business users can request them. Your business users are delighted. They check the reports frequently to increase their pleasure at how well the website you wrote is functioning. That is, until suddenly, one day, performance plummets. All of the metrics in your reports take a nosedive. The business ...