GoldenGate Software Inc., a leading provider of high availability and real-time data integration solutions across heterogeneous enterprise IT environments, held a webinar last week to showcase the results of a joint survey conducted with Unisphere Research, the research arm of Database Trends and Applications (DBTA). The survey results indicated the continued importance of the DBA role within the enterprise IT group. "Surveying the Role of Today's DBA" uncovered the realities faced by many DBAs today, driven by changing database environments and evolving responsibilities, in addition to their top priorities identified for 2009.
According to the survey of more than 400 respondents, today's DBA faces significant challenges including that of managing increasingly heterogeneous IT environments, and the responsibility to further minimize downtime, especially during upgrades to new database versions or migration to a new database or hardware platform. Select survey findings include the insights that a DBA's top operational management challenge is database performance, that almost half of the respondents indicated that mission-critical databases required six or more hours of planned downtime in 2008, and that slightly more than half said their most significant database project in 2009 is upgrading existing databases to current versions.
Even in a down economy, many companies need to do application upgrades, database upgrades, and database O/S and hardware migrations. GoldenGate believes the reason for this is "the imperative that companies utilize the latest versions of applications and databases in order to meet competitive performance requirements. Other reasons that also drive upgrades and migrations are the expiration of support on older versions of software and discontinued or unsupported hardware platforms," according to Irem Radzik, director of product marketing for GoldenGate, who spoke with 5 Minute Briefing following the webinar.
One of the main challenges involved with completing these upgrades and migrations is to reduce or eliminate the amount of planned system downtime they require. Radzik indicates that "existing disaster recovery solutions many companies already have in place do not help with this because they are based on disk replication technology which does not provide a live, synchronized copy of a database to use during the transition."
GoldenGate helps customers solve this problem by providing zero-downtime upgrades and migrations solution using database replication technology. This provides a live replica of an existing database running on a new version in parallel with the old version. Companies have the flexibility to switch users over to the new version in phases and ensure all migration issues have been solved before they completely cut over to the new system. For more information about GoldenGate Software, go here.