Reborn: Billionaire in College

Chapter 138 Establishing the Database Department

Miao Bingwei recently feels that his hair is becoming increasingly thinner. If this trend continues, he will probably be extremely smart before he is 40.

In order to cope with the launch of the "parking space grabbing" app, Chen Pingjiang specifically asked to take charge of the database and server work.

His expertise lies in software, and he is mainly responsible for software development, coding, and testing, using programming languages ​​and development tools to design and develop applications.

In other words, it is OK for making websites and games, but its database system is just average.

The current technical department of Renren is mostly composed of software engineers and network engineers.

There is an extreme shortage of hardware engineers and database engineers.

The work of these two types of engineers cannot be completed by part-time college students on campus, and experienced people must be recruited.

Renren's future development will inevitably require algorithm engineers, and even embedded engineers, network security engineers, and image processing engineers are indispensable.

Fortunately, Chen Pingjiang arranged a new office location in the Daxing Palace, otherwise there would be no way to recruit people in this remote place like Xianlin University Town.

Due to the shortage of people in key positions, Miao Bingwei has to run to Wan Yuqian's office every few days, which makes Wan Yuqian get a headache whenever she sees Miao Bingwei.

"Boss Miao, you've almost broken the threshold of my office."

The new office space on the 16th floor of Huijin Building has been put into use.

This was completed under the strong urging of Miao Bingwei and Wan Yuqian. They would not even consider having no office space.

Human resources, administration and finance have already moved to Huijin Building.

The technical department was divided into two.

Wen Yan is stationed in Room 202 of the Entrepreneurship Park. He is mainly responsible for the daily maintenance of the two websites, Renren and Renren Waimai, and provides technical support to other departments.

Miao Bingwei moved to Huijin Building to facilitate recruiting and preparations for the online parking space rush.

Song Xinyue, the administrative specialist in Wan Yuqian's office, chuckled: "Boss Miao, don't worry. Sister Yuqian and I just came back from the job fair and didn't even have time to drink a sip of water. Several good database engineers submitted their resumes this morning and have arranged to come over for a preliminary interview this afternoon."

Hearing this, Miao Bingwei finally breathed a sigh of relief: "That's good. Sorry, sorry. I'm really in a hurry. The boss gave me such a big job, which made me a little mentally weak recently."

Wan Yuqian curled her lips and said, "He rushed us all to the Grand Palace in one go, and he himself was living a carefree life in the Entrepreneurship Park. He didn't even ask for a favor when the company moved or rented a house. He was simply a hands-off boss."

Song Xinyue, who is the same age as Wan Yuqian but younger than her, stuck out her tongue. She wouldn't dare to respond to such words.

Everyone in the company knew that the only person who could say this about the boss Chen Pingjiang was Wan Yuqian. Even the earliest veteran Miao Bingwei snorted and did not respond.

In fact, the problems facing Miao Bingwei are both big and small.

If you plan the server based on 200,000 daily active users, things will be much simpler, just throw money at it and it'll be done.

But for some reason Chen Pingjiang was crazy and asked Miao Bingwei to do the preparatory work in advance and plan the server and database based on two to three million daily active users.

When he heard this request, Miao Bingwei opened his mouth so wide that he could swallow an egg, and wondered if his boss was crazy.

But Chen Pingjiang made up his mind and remained unmoved.

A server is a hardware device or computer program responsible for providing computing resources and running applications, while a database is a software system that stores and manages data.

The server needs a database to store and manage the data required by the application, and the database also needs the computing resources provided by the server to run and manage the data. The interaction between the two includes reading or writing data, which needs to be dynamically adjusted according to the needs of the application to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the data.

The relationship between a server and a database can be likened to the relationship between a waiter (server) and a chef (database).

The waiter (server) receives the customer's order request (client request) and sends the order to the chef (database). The chef prepares the dish according to the order (database operation) and then hands the finished dish to the waiter (server), who then delivers the dish to the customer (returns the result to the client).

In order to improve the performance and response speed of applications, servers and databases need to be optimized together to ensure the efficiency and stability of data access. This requires close cooperation between server and database administrators to optimize hardware, software, and networks to improve the performance and stability of the entire system.

Therefore, the server and the database are inseparable.

The relationship between them directly affects the performance and reliability of the information system. When planning and designing information systems, it is necessary to fully consider the relationship between servers and databases to ensure their coordinated work and optimization to meet the needs of applications and improve the overall performance of the system.

The moment you open your beloved goddess' QQ space, her thoughts and every fragrant selfie are all taken out of the QQ database and pasted on your face. After the goddess says "haha, go take a shower", you play Legend yourself, and the game data will also be recorded in the database.

But once the number of users reaches millions, or even two or three million, many ways of playing will change.

If these two or three million people send messages to each other, check data, and modify data at the same time, the data generated by these operations will be like a machine gun shooting at the database, and the database must become Keanu Reeves in "The Matrix" and catch every bullet. Nowadays, the MySQL database is still commonly used, which is similar to the Android of databases. It is free, convenient, and open source. In later generations, most of the large social networking companies have switched to NoSQL databases.

Chen Pingjiang was not trying to make things difficult for Miao Bingwei.

Miao Bingwei didn't know how much traffic this kind of social game would bring. If he didn't prepare in advance, the server of Grab Parking Space might crash a few days after it went online. If Grab Parking Space could crash, then there would be no point in playing the subsequent "Stealing Vegetables" game.

Every time players park a car, ticket a car, or steal vegetables, the database will be rewritten.

Even if we use the top-level mechanical hard disk of 2007, which rotates at 15000 revolutions per minute and can read and write 300 times per second, in order to ensure that data is not lost, we must make two additional backups of each data, plus three copies of the original data. Based on the data access intensity of two to three million people, it may take two thousand servers just to "grab a parking space", and the subsequent "stealing vegetables" may even require several thousand servers.

This does not even include the visits to Renren and Renren Waimai.

How could Chen Pingjiang have so much money to burn?
Tencent is currently developing CKV, which will evolve into CDB, and even TcaplusDB and DBbrain in the future.

Therefore, Chen Pingjiang hopes to do the homework in advance and make preparations early.

After talking about the database, let’s talk about the server.

At present, all servers used by Renren are rented, which has the advantages of saving costs and convenient management. After all, there is no need to use a large amount of money to purchase servers at one time and pay for subsequent high maintenance costs. The service provider will undertake daily management work and service monitoring.

But the disadvantages are also obvious. It relies too much on the technical support and service quality of the service provider, and cannot fully control the security of the server. It may also be restricted by the bandwidth, storage space and other aspects of the service provider.

Purchasing your own server is the only way to go!

Even though the initial investment is large, the subsequent maintenance costs are high, and it is necessary to hire relevant technical personnel to maintain the equipment, the higher controllability, stability and freedom are unmatched by leasing.

If Renren, a social networking site, still rented servers after becoming big, a single server outage could result in Chen Pingjiang being scolded to death, and even malicious harassment from competitors would be quite troublesome.

If the technology is not in place, it will inevitably have to buy more servers, and Renren's cash flow will undoubtedly be dragged down.

Tencent is still very good in this regard, and it has to be said that they have some skills in social networking.

It had many industry-leading technologies back then. For example, the number of people online at the same time on QQ increased from 10 to 100 million, and the processing power of a single machine was more than 10 times that of its peers. At that time, Tencent had an important technological innovation - PCT architecture, which enabled Tencent to achieve 1000 online connections when other machines could only make 1.

In addition, there is distributed storage TFS, which supports uploading billions of pictures to QQ Album every day.

If you want to play the social game, you can't avoid servers, and you may even have to build data centers in the future.

How to design a highly available IT architecture before traffic arrives?

How to quickly replenish server resources when traffic surges?

How to avoid wasting idle server resources when traffic drops?

These are all very troublesome things.

That’s the story of cloud computing.

After all, Chen Pingjiang is not the time traveler in the novel. It seems that he only needs to develop websites, games, and apps, and does not need servers and databases at all. There is no lag or crash.

Chen Pingjiang put pressure on Miao Bingwei because he had seen the future development path clearly and prepared for it.

He was asked to set up a database team, and to purchase servers and build a computer room within the financial safety line.

This made both Miao Bingwei and Shu Mang feel very uncomfortable.

Especially Shu Mang, who was just happy to see the monthly revenue of 3-400 million, but now she had to throw all that money into the server market. This was more painful than killing her.

Many people questioned why they bought servers instead of renting them. Is it necessary for a small company to set up its own database team? Is this a waste of resources?
For this purpose, Chen Pingjiang specially convened a high-level meeting.

At the meeting, Chen Pingjiang, unlike his usual cheerful self, turned into a tyrant, making the entire meeting a one-man show and rejecting all doubts.

This change caught everyone off guard.

"I know that everyone's suggestions are for the good of the company, but please forgive me for not being able to follow everyone's ideas and make mistakes sometimes. The cost is too high. This time, I insisted on my own opinion. In the near future, facts will prove whether the decision I made today is right or wrong."

"This is the final decision. All departments must implement it!"

(End of this chapter)