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Space Django: Migrating and Redesigning a Database while Hunting for Satellites.

Sunday 2:50 PM–3:20 PM in Eureka 2

Being a fast-paced startup and developing a completely new product in the Space Industry is very challenging, and moving fast wasn’t just a requirement but essential. It's the kind of environment that is hard to think too much ahead, and for that reason, our database was created to address the problems we had at hand. After a while, new products and features were required, and our database couldn't handle all of them. That’s when we decided to move our data to a newly designed database instance with proper relationships, able to handle more features, higher workloads and scalable. During the planning phase, several approaches were discussed, such as creating a script to copy the data and some off-the-shelf software that we thought could handle that for us. However, the complexity of implementing those approaches wasn’t feasible with our deadlines for releasing the new product. So, we decided to copy the data using Django ORM (our product was already using Django), the idea was to avoid the complexity of creating complex SQL Queries to copy data to new tables while keeping the data consistency and integrity. In this presentation, we aim to demonstrate how our database was limiting the company’s scalability and how we fixed those problems by migrating to a new database schema whilst maintaining two database instances, one for internal operations and the other for customer-facing functions. Moreover, we show how we did that using object-oriented programming in combination with Django’s ORM to migrate our database without the need to handle complex SQL commands to copy data, keep relationships, and create new ones.

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The presentation has three main goals; (1) show how the database that we had before was limiting the development of new products and, in the medium-term, would be a potential issue to scale; (2) present some of the options we considered and the tradeoffs; (3) the strategy we chose and how we implemented it (main challenges and how the combination of OOP and Django’s ORM actually speed up not only the process but made it easier).

Artur Baruchi He/Him • abaruchi

Artur Baruchi has a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and received an M.Sc. (2010) and a PhD degree (2015) in computer engineering from the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. From 2005 to 2015, he worked as a Unix SysAdmin for several companies such as HP, IBM, and EDS. From 2015 to 2017 he worked as a Postdoctoral researcher at Sao Paulo State University on an Open Source project about Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Cloud Computing. Also, during this period, he was a professor at Anhembi Morumbi University. After that, worked at LexisNexis as consulting Software Engineer and HPCC ambassador in several universities performing workshops and as advisor to undergraduate and graduate students. He moved to Australia in 2021 to work as an SRE at Goldman Sachs and is currently working as a Software Engineer at HEO (an Australian startup in the Space Industry) and as a technical reviewer of books for Manning Publisher.