Database Design and Data Engineering
Clean schemas, reliable pipelines, and data foundations built for long-term growth. Senior-led database engineering for businesses across the UK and Isle of Man.
Book a Free ConsultationData Foundations Built for Growth
We design and engineer databases and data platforms for businesses across the UK and Isle of Man. Clean, well-structured schemas that support your applications reliably. Scalable data architectures that perform well as your data grows. Data pipelines that move information accurately and on time. And the kind of data foundation that makes reporting, analytics, and integration straightforward rather than a constant source of friction.
Databases sit at the heart of every software system. A well-designed database schema makes everything built on top of it cleaner, faster, and more maintainable. A poorly designed one creates problems that compound with every new feature, every additional user, and every attempt to extract meaningful information from the data. The decisions made in the first week of a database design project determine how much everything else costs for the next decade.
Every database and data system we design is the work of Owen Jones, OLXR's founder and lead engineer, with over a decade of experience designing production database systems across fintech, e-gaming, SaaS, and enterprise. We treat database design as the engineering discipline it is - not something to rush through before getting to the interesting parts of the application.
Who This Is For
What We Deliver
Our Approach
Design for the Queries, Not Just the Data
A database schema that stores data correctly but makes the queries your application needs to run slow or complex is a poorly designed schema. We design database structures with the access patterns of the application in mind - understanding what queries need to be fast, what data needs to be aggregated, and what relationships need to be traversed - and making schema and indexing decisions that support those patterns efficiently.
Normalise with Purpose
Database normalisation is a tool, not a rule. Over-normalised schemas make queries complex and slow. Under-normalised schemas create update anomalies and data integrity problems. We apply normalisation principles with judgment - normalising where it prevents data integrity issues, and deliberately denormalising where the query performance benefit justifies the trade-off. Every structural decision is made consciously rather than by convention.
Build Security In
Database security is built into our design process from the start, not added afterwards. That means role-based access control that restricts what each application component can read and write, encryption for sensitive data at rest and in transit, audit logging for operations on sensitive records, and a principle of least privilege that limits the potential impact of any single security failure.
Why Choose OLXR
Database design is one of the most undervalued disciplines in software development. It is common for development teams to treat the database as an afterthought - designing the application first and fitting the database around it. We treat database design as a first-class concern.
Senior-Led
Over a decade of production database experience
Data-First
We treat the database as a first-class concern
Honest Assessment
We will tell you what your schema actually needs
Long-Term Support
We maintain and optimise after launch
The decisions made in the first week of a database design project determine how much everything else costs for the next decade.
Frequently Asked Questions
Ready to Get Your Data Under Control?
Tell us about your data challenges. We will give you an honest assessment of what is causing them and what a well-designed solution would look like.
Book a Free Consultation