Database Design & Management Services

Every application runs on data, and the quality of your database design directly determines the performance, maintainability, and scalability of your software system. A well-designed database handles growth gracefully; a poorly designed one becomes a bottleneck that requires increasingly expensive workarounds.

QivaLabs provides database design and management services for applications at all stages. For new projects, we design the data model from first principles: normalisation decisions, relationship design, indexing strategy, and schema naming conventions that make future development straightforward. We document the schema and the reasoning behind key design decisions.

For existing applications with performance problems, we conduct database performance audits: analysing slow query logs, reviewing indexing strategies, identifying N+1 query patterns in application code, and recommending structural changes or query rewrites that can dramatically improve response times.

We work across the major database platforms: PostgreSQL (our default recommendation for most applications), MySQL/MariaDB (for existing MySQL applications and WordPress-based systems), MongoDB (for document-oriented data and high-write workloads), and Redis (for caching, sessions, and real-time features).

Database management services include: backup configuration and verification (tested restores, not just backups), replication setup for read scaling and failover, regular maintenance windows for VACUUM, ANALYZE, and index rebuilds, slow query monitoring and proactive optimisation, and capacity planning based on growth trends.

For cloud databases (AWS RDS, Cloud SQL, Atlas), we handle the setup, configuration, and ongoing management of managed database services, balancing convenience with cost and control.