3 ways tools can streamline your database maintenance procedures

Database management and monitoring tools are a great solution for streamlining the way your DBAs work. With the potential to save time, make workflows more efficient, and save your company money, these tools can change the way that IT teams work, providing access to greater automation and oversight of a business’s infrastructure.

Many large organisations around the world already make use of tools like these to help with managing and maintaining their servers, and here we’ll explore three ways that they can help your team too:

Automated Maintenance

Automation is one of the best ways to streamline database maintenance, saving staff time, cutting your costs and giving DBAs the ability to focus on other important tasks.

Many tools designed for large and scalable database servers provide the ability to automate maintenance and a host of other tasks too. From automatic backups and updates to routine report production and real-time alerts, these tools can handle the small tasks that would otherwise take up a DBAs time.

Automated maintenance can also offer an organisation an additional level of security and stability. With DBAs occupied with other important tasks, database tools can ensure that essential work is still completed and that your system is well maintained, meaning you’ll never have to worry about vital work being overlooked by busy staff.

Faster Deployment

Increasingly, many businesses are now making use of large and rapidly expanding numbers of servers and instances for their work. While this growth brings many advantages to businesses with additional storage and resource availability, larger systems can be harder for DBAs to manage.

Monitoring and management solutions that have been designed to work with large and varied systems can help in these cases, however. Capable of providing an overview and access to a very high number of instances at once, regardless of their platform or version, these tools can allow DBAs to apply changes to all instances across their business at once.

Being able to affect changes on all of your instances at once from within just one tool reduces the time it takes DBAs to complete maintenance and procedural changes, and also can help to reduce system downtime too. Long periods of downtime, or slowdowns caused by DBAs working on systems, can have a negative impact on customers and potentially cost you valuable business.

A Unified Approach

Not only do these tools dramatically reduce the amount of time needed to make changes across a large number of servers, but they can also provide a simple and unified overview of your entire system.

Making use of these solutions, DBAs can control, monitor and report on all instances in one place, regardless of software versions or platform, streamlining their processes and cutting down on the inefficient use of time and money. DBAs can edit databases, control user groups and security, and make all other changes that they need without having to load up a whole suite of tools – just one scalable tool can handle the entire system.

Using just one interface like this has the advantage of saving DBAs time by streamlining their maintenance and monitoring processes. With less time spent switching between tools, accessing different servers and completing routine tasks, DBAs can allocate their time to more pressing issues to help your business.

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With the help of database tools designed specifically to help streamline and automate your database maintenance procedures, your DBAs can work more efficiently to save your business time and money.

4 ways database management tools can reduce your IT costs

For many organisations today, spiralling IT costs are a major concern. From the cost of operating large server farms, to staffing and maintenance costs, IT budgets are growing exponentially in many industries.

To help businesses to help mitigate some of the costs of working with large server farms, and to help their staff be more efficient, several solutions now exist for monitoring and managing databases. From cutting down on unnecessary bills to making DBA teams more productive and streamlining workflows, these tools are built from the ground up for efficiency, scalability and use by large enterprises.

Here, we’ll cover four ways that these solutions can keep your IT costs in check and improve efficiency.

Fewer Serious Incidents

Disasters and serious incidents represent a very high financial cost for businesses, both in the time spent planning and the cost of restoring services and maintaining security.

For many IT teams, a lack of oversight over their systems means that emerging incidents aren’t discovered until it’s too late. By making use of database monitoring solutions, DBAs can utilise proactive monitoring and analytics to detect and correct problems before they become serious. Monitoring tools can also be used to discover security weaknesses, to identify struggling infrastructure, and to institute regular preventative maintenance across your servers and instances.

Lower Licensing Costs

Many software providers offer several forms of license for organisations to choose from, with an enterprise license usually being the most expensive and offering access to the full range of software features. Quite often, however, DBAs won’t use or need the full suite of features that enterprise licenses unlock. Despite that, many businesses still pay for enterprise licenses which they don’t need, either by accident or because their needs have changed and they lack the time, tools or expertise to detect and correct the situation.

Database management tools help to solve this problem. By analysing actual usage and reporting on which software and features are being used versus licensing level, DBAs can leverage management tools to track and adjust their licensing levels.

In the case of Oracle, in particular, many DBAs overstep the standard license terms inadvertently or by accident. Oracle always supplies its full suite of tools to DBAs regardless of license, and later demanding more money if they discover via audit that a company used tools or features that they hadn’t been licensed for – something easily done when changing just one option can trigger full and costly enterprise licenses.

Optimised Performance

The performance of your IT systems is vital to your business, not just because it provides your customers and staff with a smooth service but because it saves you money too. Poorly performing servers can lead to slowdowns at work, potentially disrupting services to customers which could cost your organisation valuable business and hurt your reputation.

With the help of database management tools, DBAs can optimise the performance of your organisation’s IT systems, improving your setup to ensure that it constantly runs smoothly.

Be More Productive

DBA productivity is one of the key areas that can be improved by any enterprise looking to cut costs and improve operational expenses. With the right solutions, DBAs can get access to the analytics, insight and monitoring that they need to perform their jobs efficiently and to allocate their time where it’s most needed.

Many database management tools offer streamlined interfaces that allow DBAs easy access to all the information that they need and the ability to monitor multiple instances at once. Tools like this also combine the features of many other individual server tools, saving time for DBAs and reducing the amount of time spent training to use new software.