Best Database Administration Solution

Aug 4, 2015

Maintaining and optimizing database management systems has never been as important or as complex Today, it involves far more than simply ensuring the high performance of a set of homogenous databases.

As a result, organizations need solutions that can provide assistance with both managing routine day-to-day operations, as well as providing alerts and insights when something has gone drastically wrong with mission-critical database applications. Fortunately, there are a growing array of tools and automated solutions to help make the job easier and more predictable.

According to a recent survey conducted by Unisphere Research and sponsored by Dell, nearly half of the DBAs manage more than 25 database instances each and 10% have responsibility for managing more than 100 database instances. In addition, 72% of respondents report that the number of databases instances is growing. And increasingly the data environment is not just relational databases. The survey found that as Hadoop and NoSQL databases become more entrenched in the enteprise, DBAs are like to to be the caretakers for this non-relational infrastructure as well.

Automation is a key approach for freeing up DBAs from the routine and onerous responsibilities that can consume much of their time. In terms of automated tasks, the survey found that verification that all database instances are up and running is the most widespread use of automation, followed by monitoring of disk space, verifying success of database backups, and verification that all jobs scheduled jobs have complete successfully.

This is followed by inspection of error logs for unusual events, verification that replicated databases are synchronized, review of database size and growth settings, cloning and provisioning databases for test and development, and performance tuning for database workloads.

The ability to help streamline processes and decrease the risks is an important benefit to overburdened DBAs and data professionals and their organizations. It enables them to be sure that that their systems are working at the highest level at all times and to ward off potential problems before they hurt the performance of databases and related applications that are so critical to the business.