Database Management

Getting Started

Developing new database systems can be a labour intensive process and requires a strong foundation of database concepts including normalisation, integrity and optimization. Getting the balance between these factors is essential for minimizing problems, maximizing the value from time invested, and creating maintainable and extendable systems while providing effective and responsive support for application systems.

Databases can be developed on top of a number of database management systems to support many varying application frameworks, but all of these use a common theme and Structured Query Language (SQL).

Why should you pay attention to your database?

Databases are recognized as valuable assets by organisations storing important information about business operations, customers, finances and much more. These large repositories of commercially sensitive information need to be taken seriously – just imagine losing 2 years of financial transactions because your database was poorly maintained. What if you are dealing with someone else’s data, for example patient details? The problem just gets bigger.

The ramifications of inadequate database management practices can result in businesses falling over or at the very least cause drops in productivity. The results are pretty much always the same: lost money, lost business opportunities, and lost customers. For example, in 2008 it was estimated that a full-scale global outage would cost Amazon $31,000 per minute. Can your business afford that?

The bottom-line is that database maintenance is important. But in itself, database maintenance has to be smart and strategic: you cannot simply take off your production database for a 10 hour check-up. Your customers will not tolerate such long delays – they expect to be able to access the system around the clock with almost instant responses. For businesses, this also knocks down the revenues. Coming back to Amazon, 10 hours of maintenance would tally up to $18.6 million.

Database Management & You

So what’s the solution? Essentially, database management and maintenance should be a structured, well planned and executed exercise, causing minimal disruptions to system availability. The key objectives of database management are:

Stable performance: Maintain the database at optimal performance
Safety: Protect your database from unauthorized access, data leakage or data loss
Database integrity: Detect database inconsistencies and corrupt data caused by hardware or software errors
Business Compliance: Identify database structures, relationships and data that do not conform to business rules or are erroneous
Disaster recovery: Support disaster recovery planning through data and transaction log back-ups
Downtime: Minimize database downtime for maximum availability by scheduling maintenance during off-peak hours or consider having a second production database

You should consider investing in database management, if:

You rely on databases to support your organisation, but lack an internal IT capability
You want to improve disaster recovery planning through off-site back-ups
You want an independent assessment of your database management practices
You want to improve your overall database performance using industry-grade methods and techniques

The Canary Method

The team at Canary has a solid foundation in database design, implementation and management. We can ensure that your database systems are running smoothly giving your business the best results possible.

Contact us to explore how our first-class database services can help your organisation. In the meantime, click here to read about some of our customers’ success stories.