Author: Khaled Kahlouni

Companies have a wealth of information systems as they continue to collect mountains of data on a daily basis. The need to house their information and have them readily available will always be there. Therefore, creating, monitoring, and maintaining the databases that house the data, pose higher challenges on the Information Technology department; in specific, the database administrators and their management. Even though now-a-days, we continue to see improvement in hardware design, operating systems stability, and database engines features; the need for database lifecycle management, best practices, and process standardization has not and will not change anytime soon.

Databases are the heart and soul of every systems/applications built or acquired within an organization. They are the center of all information, data movement, and communication of all systems. If the data is the most valuable asset of every company so is the database that houses it, making the database administration role the most critical job in IT. Therefore, effective database management is an essential task to ensure the availability, performance, recoverability, and security of such asset. Unfortunately, most companies do not realize the importance of the staff that administers their most valuable asset. They understand the need to have a staff but they always question their value and of course, their compensation. Thus, pressuring the Database Administrator staff to do nothing but, monitor the databases.

Database Administrators are highly talented individuals. They have to maintain their skills and keep up with new DBMS technology. In addition, they have to have a good understanding of all applications, data behavior, and hardware technology as they swiftly solve issues and problems with the databases they support – They are excellent problem solver individuals. So, their talent is beyond administration. But, due to the wrong perception by their management, their concentration is usually shifted to only monitoring and backing up the database, leaving several database administration roles un-played. Thus, forcing the database administrators to lose the essential skills to maintain and administer the most valuable company asset – Databases.

Every IT professional should try to answer the following questions as a health check:

• Have you ever tested recovering your production databases?
• How many times your database backup fails because of hardware or tape issues?
• How many times problems occur after a release or a migration?
• How many non-DBA users have more than read access to your production databases?
• How many times were you notified by your users of a problem before your staff knowledge of the problem?
• Do you keep current inventory of all databases?
• Do you know what your users query of your database?
• In case the data was lost, can your company survive?

This study will help your organization understand the necessary database administration roles. Most importantly, it will lay the proper roadmap for database administration.

The roadmap will guide your organization on how to be proactive rather than reactive. Catching and solving database problems before they occur proven to be more cost effective than reacting to the problem. For instance, using our roadmap will force you to monitor your space utilization. Thus, alerting of any space issues prior to your database running out of space.

Study’s Outline:

• General Assessment Process
• Understand Current Environments
• Database Management lifecycle Establishment
• Improvement Plan
• Measurement Process
• Production Maturity Process