Handbook and Tips: Remote DBA Program: 6-Step Guide and Most Common Mistakes Abstract: Enterprises have become increasingly pressured by external market conditions in developing a remote database administration strategy, yet few succeed in designing an effective cost-saving approach. This whitepaper will explain how to improve return on investment using remote DBA, and avoid most common mistakes implementing and managing it. By Michael Fedotov, Renat Khasanshyn, Alex Khizhnyak
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Remote DBA Program: 6-Step Guide and Most Common Mistakes
Enterprises have become increasingly pressured by external market conditions in developing a remote database administration strategy, yet few succeed in designing an effective cost-saving approach. This whitepaper will explain how to improve return on investment using remote DBA, and avoid most common mistakes implementing and managing it.
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Handbook and Tips: Remote DBA Program: 6-Step Guide and Most Common Mistakes
Abstract:
Enterprises have become increasingly pressured by external market conditions in developing a remote database
administration strategy, yet few succeed in designing an effective cost-saving approach. This whitepaper will explain
how to improve return on investment using remote DBA, and avoid most common mistakes implementing and
managing it.
By Michael Fedotov,
Renat Khasanshyn,
Alex Khizhnyak
Remote DBA Program: 6-Step Guide and Most Common Mistakes
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Table of Contents
1. Executive Summary 3
2. Why Remote DBA? 3
3. Database Administrator’s Scope of Work 4
4. Remote DBA Lifecycle 5
5. Common Mistakes 9
6. Benchmarking Remote DBA: When and Why 11
7. About the Authors 11
8. References 13
Remote DBA Program: 6-Step Guide and Most Common Mistakes
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1. Executive Summary
Relational databases, which are by far the most popular
kind of databases, are an essential part of every modern
business. Maintaining them has grown to be one of the
most crucial tasks for enterprises. As a result, today
database administration has become one of the hardest challenges businesses may encounter.
Every three years, relational databases like Oracle grow 3x to 5x in size. More than that,
enterprises face the necessity of managing a growing number of databases containing more
data with increasingly high requirements for uptime and security.
The soaring amounts of work are becoming harder and harder for the enterprises’ data
administrators to deal with, and eventually employing new personnel seems inevitable. The
reality is, trying to catch up with the progress by employing more is not only an unreasonable
solution, it also tends to become unfeasible. The reason is that rarely do the budgets allocated
for database administration rise as fast as the actual cost of administration, if it is provided by
just the internal resources of the company.
These issues, or ideally their anticipation, bring enterprises to realize that a different approach is
needed to handle the challenge.
And remote database administration (DBA) is quite a different approach. The idea behind
remote DBA is simple: you entrust a third-party service provider to take care of your databases.
While the general benefits of the approach and its necessity are doubtless, it is important, when
deciding on the service provider, to make the right choice.
This whitepaper will present a 6-step guide to planning, designing, and managing remote DBA,
and explain how to improve return on investment (ROI) and avoid the most common mistakes.
2. Why Remote DBA?
It’s hard to imagine a modern enterprise without relational databases. Providing infrastructure
for data storage and management, they have grown to be a vital component of both the smaller
enterprises, and Fortune 500 giants.
Enterprises often seem to underestimate the role of their relational databases until they run into
problems with database administration.
Many enterprises employ just one database administrator. Now, when he or she is not able to
do their job (for example, if they take a vacation), their duties are likely to be temporarily handed
over to other employees. And are they quite competent to cope with such an important task?
More than that, the huge dependence of the enterprise on one or a few people is always a risk
factor. Even when there are two or three people permanently involved with DBA in an
enterprise, absence of one of them can be a threat to the smoothness of database
administration, taking into account the amount of work and the necessity to reallocate it
promptly.
Relational databases,
such as Oracle, grow 3x
to 5x in size every three
years.
Remote DBA Program: 6-Step Guide and Most Common Mistakes
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But safety is not the only concern here. Generally speaking, most of a DBA’s workday is spent
on repetitive, low-level administrative work, whose ROI is fairly low in spite of its being critical to
database maintenance.
Relying on remote DBA is advantageous in both aspects. On the one hand, it guarantees your
data is safe, since taking care of databases is the direct competence of a remote DBA server
provider. On the other hand, remote database administration
is beneficial financially, ridding the enterprise of such a
considerable, yet cost-ineffective expense as keeping internal
DBA. Depending on the amount and specific character of
work, remote DBA can help cut DBA expenses by 40% or
more.
Another huge benefit of remote DBA is round-the-clock
database monitoring. 24x7 support is rarely feasible for an
enterprise’s in-house staff, both from logistical and cost
positions. At the same time, it’s often necessary, particularly for companies that provide a 24-
hour interface with customers via the Internet. Remote DBA companies make this possible.
3. Database Administrator’s Scope of Work
Being a good database administrator requires versatile professional talents, as the process of
DBA comprises a number of rather different activities. Performance tuning, troubleshooting,
cloning, data modeling, installation, backup, and recovery, all of which are inalienable parts of
the database maintaining process, are equally important. And a successful database
administrator has to master all of the above. On top of that, good communication skills and other
typical (however, not always easy-to-meet) requirements for any person involved in teamwork
are still there.
Commonly, a database administration routine comprises such activities as checking alert logs,