SQL Database Components for Azure eCommerce

From a performance and scalability perspective, eCommerce applications are very powerful; they encapsulate numerous off-the-shelf security features that are incorporated with the Microsoft Azure cloud. From a general point of view, one of the core advantages to the Azure cloud is how the performance and scalability are built-in. However, this may pose a challenge to Azure eCommerce providers who lack knowledge or are incapable of configuring and optimizing that environment for performance.

Clarity delivers a robust platform that is oriented for Azure eCommerce, and specifically has the capability of leveraging Azure SQL database best practices. When you're evaluating an Azure eCommerce provider, we recommend that you consider a few critical components in regard to the Azure SQL databases. Firstly, contemplate whether the provider is effectively taking advantage of the security that's built into the Azure SQL databases. One of the most attractive features of Azure SQL is that you enjoy plentiful enterprise-level capabilities at a fraction of the cost.

Topping the security list lies the supreme ability to leverage data encryption at rest. Although a lot of credit card information is regulated by PCI DSS security compliance requirements, securing data at rest is exceptionally important. The reason is that a substantial amount of sensitive information is still inside the database in general: contact info, email addresses, and other key information about purchase history.

Considerations for SQL Databases

Being able to leverage an Azure database that encrypts data by default is a highly powerful security capability. It’s advisable to ensure that your Azure eCommerce platform is taking advantage of that offering. In addition, it's also possible to leverage best practices for how you're connecting to the database and how your Azure eCommerce application is configured. Ideally, the application itself is securely talking to the database and the IP address for the application pools. If you have a virtual machine connected to the Azure SQL database, the IP addresses and the connection string information must be heavily locked down.

It’s recommended to make sure that your Azure eCommerce provider isn't causing any of the above to become potential security risks. We encourage setting up and configuring the system in a way that efficiently secures the connection string information, including how the eCommerce application talks to the Azure SQL database.

We also strongly advise looking at the performance side of your Azure eCommerce SQL database. Both the SQL databases and Azure are capable of scaling up or down, and they have different forms of billing and resource allocation. It's really important to understand those alternative options because they heavily dictate what access you have to the resources that are supporting the Azure SQL database you're using.

As a Microsoft partner, the Clarity eCommerce platform is highly tuned to Azure and supports seamless interoperability. It’s also designed and architected on the .NET framework, which generally helps to significantly leverage all of the advantages the Azure hosting infrastructure has to offer. Finally, there are plentiful Azure-specific nuances where Clarity has a strong background and specializes in.

One of the most common challenges with using Azure SQL databases is how there are too many transactions trying to hit the database within a certain period of time. Azure is a cloud environment where resources are massively shared and commoditized. It's crucial, from a billing perspective, that Microsoft uses the appropriate industry standards for how they monitor and prevent overuse of resources. Whenever shared resources have a single over-consuming user, those resources are limited and won't abuse the entire system by overrunning those limits. In practice, this translates into proper planning for the required resources and a projection of possible changes in the future.

If you need a lot of resources, you need to make sure the right scalability choices are in place and that you're comfortable with how the Azure eCommerce application is using them. In other words, if it’s highly inefficient, you’d want to factor that in whenever you're looking at available Azure eCommerce applications. It's definitely possible for the Azure eCommerce database to be very incompetent with its transactions. In this case, you'd have to spend a lot more money within the Azure environment to get the resources allocated to your database, compared to a more efficient Azure SQL database. It’s something like a car with really low gas mileage. When evaluating the performance side of things, we also suggest looking at:

• The amount of transactions
• The level of caching
• How exactly the application is caching calls to the database
• Whether or not it's using Entity Framework
• Caching within any framework or another way of connecting with the database

Database Efficiency and Scalability

Ultimately, the core premise is that performance is an absolute key component of any eCommerce application within Azure. We strongly recommend evaluating that heavily because there can be quite a big difference in performance and costs, based on how the application was architected. In addition, we advise taking a look at the capability of the Azure eCommerce platform that you're evaluating for scaling up, scaling down and clustering options.

The basic premise here is that if data is architected in a way that renders it unable to run on a scaled or clustered environment, then the opportunity to improve the performance and scalability of the application will be lost. The same is true in the event of incompatibility among the way data is stored and how the database itself is architected.

The ability to cluster databases, have scalability and failover across regions are imperative components for streamlined growth. Depending on the circumstances, you may not need to scale right away but it’s certainly something to keep in mind when evaluating different Azure eCommerce applications.

Another thing about the Azure SQL databases is the possibility to leverage best practices within the database itself and architecting it to take advantage of the benefits offered by the enterprise-level capabilities that are available within Azure. This includes using indexes and making sure that the foreign key relationships are set up properly within the actual database.

Finally, a few more things to consider is the way data is pulled in and searched, what types of queries are run and how those are optimized. For key queries that are happening often, we recommend a discussion with your Azure eCommerce platform provider. You should determine whether or not they've:

• Laboriously audited
• Run load testing
• Run performance validation
• Resolved any hotspots with key queries that go against the database

We hope this article was informative in regard to Azure eCommerce SQL databases. We invite you to discover more in the articles below. If you have any further questions about Azure eCommerce, don’t hesitate to contact us. We’d love to share answers and complimentary resources. You're always welcome to contact one of our friendly and knowledgeable experts who would be happy to review your project.

• Microsoft Azure eCommerce Overview
• Microsoft Azure Security Platform
• SQL Database Components for Azure eCommerce
• Application Services within Azure eCommerce
• ECommerce API Integration
• Scaling & Application Performance Optimization
• Elevated Azure eCommerce Security & API Incorporation
• How Caching Raises Performance