Database Development

Database development covers schema design, query optimisation, migration planning and the ongoing operational work of keeping a database reliable as data volume and application load grow. It sits underneath nearly every other engineering decision in an application, which is why its design deserves disproportionate attention early.

This spans both relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) for structured, relationship-heavy data, and document or key-value stores (MongoDB, Redis) where flexibility or raw read/write speed matters more than strict relational structure — choosing correctly between them is itself part of the work.

A schema that cannot represent something the business needs later is the single most common cause of an expensive rewrite — multi-currency support, historical records that must not change, entities belonging to multiple parents, permissions that vary by relationship rather than role. These are hard cases precisely because retrofitting them into an existing schema, with existing data and existing application logic depending on it, is far more expensive than designing for them from the start.

Query performance also compounds silently — a query that is fine at a thousand rows and unacceptably slow at a million is a common, predictable failure that proper indexing and schema design prevent, rather than a problem to firefight after the fact.