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Why Automate the Database?
By Robert Gardos 08/15/2006
Let’s face it, if you’re going to have a successful e-commerce company – you need to do two things well: take great care of your customer, and make sure your Website is performing around-the-clock. But even before you do these two things, you had better make sure your database is properly maintained.
The database is the lifeblood of most any e-commerce company, large or small. Its performance and availability is the engine that drives the bottom line. Without it, sustaining a customer-driven business is like eating soup with a fork.
While the database is an area of e-commerce that warrants and often receives significant investment, the amount typically invested by a start-up is understandably tiny compared to that of a Fortune 1000 company. In fact, most small shops dedicate only a single talented individual – regarded as “the DBA” or Database Administrator – to attend to its ongoing maintenance. So how does an emerging e-commerce company create a mission critical database environment without the big company budget or resources?
Although outsourcing is an option, it’s expensive and in most cases, doesn’t fit the budget of a small business. Instead, a number of small companies tend to overload their DBA, asking them to serve as the Operational DBA, the DBA Architect and DBA Application Developer. That’s a lot of hats to wear – especially considering Oracle issues, on average, two patches per month, per database. Because of the complexity and time associated with patching alone, many patches simply don’t get installed – even at large organizations. This not only contributes to an increase in database “fire fighting,” but can potentially compromise the security and stability of an entire system.
In fact, according to a recent study conducted by Customer Relationship Management firm, Jet Powered Group, DBAs spend between 40% and 80% of their time on problem identification and resolution instead of contributing to performance optimization through tuning, infrastructure planning and proactive management. In other words, they’re spending a majority of their time maintaining the status quo and not focusing on the more strategic, revenue-generating activities.
Only recently have a growing faction of e-commerce companies – including ReserveAmerica, the nation’s leading provider of online camping reservations – found not only significant cost reductions, but the ability to grow existing revenue through the introduction of database automation. By automating the management of regularly recurring, mundane database maintenance tasks such as auditing, patching, provisioning and replication – DBAs are finding more time to focus on high-quality, revenue-related activity.
Through automation, database maintenance activities that previously took days or weeks can be performed in a matter of hours. Since implementing an automated solution ReserveAmerica has successfully streamlined its database infrastructure management while processing a rapidly increasing number of transactions. Meanwhile, the company has achieved more than 50% cost savings by avoiding new hardware and software purchases and improved scalability to accommodate future growth.
However, aside from the day-to-day efficiency and time-saving opportunities available through database automation, the technology also provides e-commerce companies with more visibility and control over their data assets. By using automated tools that provide a unified view into every aspect of the database infrastructure, organizations can monitor and record all activity that takes place at the database level – including all DBA activity.
Because databases remain one of the last frontiers of manual operation, DBAs are required to engage in a number of hands-on processes in order to execute core management duties. Under most circumstances, the DBA has full and unobstructed influence over the databases they manage – unaccountable and detectable to no one. As a result, even the most rigorous compliance controls in use today can be circumvented by the DBA. So, a “rogue DBA” has the potential to do a lot of damage.
All rogue activity aside, recent research from the Bureau of Labor Statistics also notes that the pool of database administrators has swelled faster than other IT-related jobs. The number of people calling themselves database administrators jumped 10% from a year ago and 36% since 2001. The demand for administrators is expected to continue with Labor Statistics projecting 66% growth in DBA jobs through 2010. So, as more of these job opportunities become available (or churn), companies are potentially exposing and compromising their data.
Growing e-commerce companies need a centralized, automated mechanism to track DBA behavior that is both manageable and irrefutable. When DBA and database monitoring is systematized and automated, data integrity cannot be compromised. In fact, it’s reliably ensured even as the IT architecture grows in size and complexity.
The good news is that databases are already capable of providing users with just the sort of information they need to ensure compliance and monitoring, so addressing this problem is simpler than most CIOs may realize.
Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that organizations must have one reliable and automated source of irrefutable truth at the database level to ensure compliance, security and efficiency. Without it, true compliance is close to impossible, effective auditing is elusive and security will be forever compromised. So the question is: How important is your data?
Robert Gardos is CEO of GridApp Systems (www.gridapp.com), a leading provider of database automation and management solutions that help simplify and manage critical database operational tasks such as deployment, patch management, auditing and replication. Mr. Gardos was formerly the CTO and General Manager of Register.com (RCOM), an Internet organization specializing in domain name registration, where he helped grow the company to a publicly traded and profitable entity, increasing annual revenues from $1 million to $125 million.