Database administration is one of the core tasks in enterprise IT infrastructure management. In this data-intensive era, the database plays a central role in managing the applications, websites, or anything related to business operations. There are many things to consider ensuring successful database administration. Database administration requires technical knowledge and awareness of the database admin tools. Still, you should gain a real insight into the business objective and the specific database use cases to have custom-devised solutions. Here. We are discussing some primary guidelines for better and effective database administration.
Tips for database administrators
- Follow better delegation models
It is crucial to maintain a good staffing model in terms of the delegation. You need to know who is responsible for each database administration element and who knows the required processes and protocols for managing the databases well. This may mean that hiring people with SQL-related experience and skills is necessary or looking for people with server monitoring experience. It may also mean communicating well to spread the needed work across the levels sustainably and efficiently.
So, the key here is to improve the process of delegation. A database administrator may essentially be inundated with many requests. For this, having different people involved in managing the influx is necessary to contribute towards better and effective management.
- Try to build centralized systems
One major pitfall in terms of database administration is that there is too much data from various sources. This is a very common scenario in modern-day enterprise systems. For this, instead of having many endpoints routing information to a DB, ensure that you incorporate a comprehensive process for the data admins to track data sources. It makes sense to curate the data you hold on the company systems. Many administrators make the mistake of adding many random into one and go overwhelmed with the tasks they handle. The ideal solution for this is to set up a strict protocol for data to be added only on an as-needed basis, which may require signoff from different designated individuals.
- Manage alerts and notifications
As we can see around, automation has not done a lot in terms of database management. It has largely changed how we monitor the systems, and it is also essential to keep an eye on the data-intensive application processes. However, alerts and notifications can still do their job well or poorly.
As a general rule of thumb, we need to build an admirable level of alert and notifications into the system. However, you may not want a blizzard of many trivial notifications and alerts popping up every once in a while. It is also sure that the staff will learn how to be in tune with them over time. It may be ideal to have a tiered system; however, many organizations tend to go with limited or restricted systems where a notification means something significant and needs close attention. For database-related services, you can rely on providers like RemoteDBA.com.
- Streamline the backup and restoration
This also goes along with the last tip we discussed, which is about structuring your database system. One needs to ensure that the database backup and restoration plans are there and executed from time to time. Make sure that you maintain a centralized strategy behind the backup and restoration operations. You may not want the people to go in random and try to perform the database maintenance. Everything has to be well organized and structured. When it comes to structuring the data, the raw data has to be managed at the points where it can be cleaned so that it will be compliant with the data requirements for a specific process. Having random, corrupt, or data that is not structured at the key points may harm the efficiency of systems and databases.
- Plan security
Nowadays, all sorts of information may come under heavy restrictions in terms of information security and privacy. To confront the challenges in terms of data security, it is essential to have a plan upfront than thinking of security as and when we confront problems. It is important to have proper audits run from time to time and protocols and go-to operations, which will help tackle any issues with data security. The security best practices start with establishing a proper “life cycle” for database use with an architecture. The plan should protect every step in the cycle. For enterprise databases, the key security tips involve authentication for the SQL Server, which gives all the admins specific access. It is also important to use database firewalls and other proprietary solutions for data protection.
- Choosing the right environment
There is a heated debate going on as if container virtualization has to practice as an ideal approach to house a DB. Some experts warn about compromising the universality of data and consistency and whereas some others congratulate the rapid deployment of the container-based data systems. You may ideally approach this based on your specific use case. It is ideal to understand whether the distributed environment you work with will harm data consistency. It is good to get synchronized and collective updates, which is incredibly important and must act as a central point of the database administration plan.
Considering the major challenges enterprise databases face nowadays, we can see that these are some of the frequent and most important pieces of advice which database administrators may get from the experts. A typical database administration process in a growing organization is not easy, which requires technical knowledge and the true expertise gained through the exposure of tackling adverse database situations based on the specific nature of the business one handles.
However, many new databases are coming into the picture and you have so many options to choose from. Apart from the traditional relational SQL databases, there are now NoSQL databases, too, which follows a non-relation database model and can store and process a huge volume of unstructured data as in the case of Big Data applications.
