Plan your data management strategy

The planning stage is when you decide on the basic building blocks of your application: the language or languages in which you’ll write it, what the user interface will look like, and any existing technologies you intend to leverage (including a data management system).

When planning for your application’s data requirements, it’s good to consider such factors as:

What will my schema look like? Will I use one database or several?

A Fauna database may have several collections, and it’s possible to query across them, but the same is not true for databases, so you may want to use multiple databases to hold different kinds of information which should be kept isolated.

Fauna has a flexible data structure, so different documents in a collection don’t all need to have the same fields, but it’s still a good idea to think ahead about how your documents and collections will work together to maintain data integrity and query efficiency.

What sorts of data access patterns will I employ?

Setting up the correct indexes on your collections is crucial for successful data management. Knowing which of your collections will be read-heavy, which will be write-heavy, and what sorts of queries will run against them should inform your indexing strategy.

How will I authenticate users?

Different kinds of application users require different levels of access privileges. Fauna allows you to create access keys with defined roles, so you can plan for admin-level access, user-level access, and any other roles you might need.

Do I have data residency requirements?

Government regulations, especially concerning applications that collect personally identifiable information, may require that data be stored in a particular geographical location, so take that into consideration when you choose a Region Group for your databases.

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