Thanks for taking up the case.

Readers be ware

Technical-like information by a non-tech person. This might make you cringe.

Some more background.

First, the CRM/ERP app we're talking about is ging to be a commercial product. So all demands and requirements should be seen in that type of dynamic.

The system is designed to communicate with front-end websites through webservices. So it has both 'inside' users and 'outside' users. (There must be a term for that, but I don't know what it is.)

The app will manage the entire 360 degree process of an organization's transactions, including fulfillment.

We had to resort to developing this solution ourselves, because no other solution out there could meet our specific needs, so what is an entrepreneur to do, in those situations.

The app's interface and functionality is designed by myself and the actual development, including database design is done by our development partner.

The company itself, Expo revolves around entrepreneurship and is getting ready for launch. We have huge ambitions, but are determined to build our company by bootstrapping it from the first dollar on up. Or actually the first Euro, since we have a European background.

So, on to the case.

Database Backend

Of course, how could I forget to mention in my first comment: We're intending to use MySQL.

And that's about all I personally can say about that.

With regards to these choices we can go any which way we want still, so the question should perhaps be, how do we need to do it, in order to reach the ideal goals of scaling up and down automatically on EC2 and using S3 as our persistant storage for all data.

Backup Strategy

The hourly backup was a suggestion, not a requirement.

What I want is to have the best possbile data-safety, within reason. So my traditional thoughts are something like a RAID solution, with added backups.

Data Partitioning.

We are still free to make choices here.

I expect, and I repeat expect, a typical client to have a dataset in the size of 1Gb to 5Gb over time.

Is this enough to get you started?

Danny