Scalable Databases

Scalable databases provide the flexibility needed to support ongoing business development, allowing organizations to expand operations without outgrowing their IT capabilities.

On the technical side, it’s how a database system handles an increasing amount of work or its potential to be enlarged to accommodate growth. Scalability ensures that databases and associated server infrastructures can manage larger volumes of data and user requests without performance degradation.

• Vertical Scalability is scaling up by adding more power to existing databases (CPU, RAM). 

• Horizontal Scalability is scaling out by adding more machines to a system. 

• Elastic Scalability is adjusting resources dynamically based on demand. 

When your business grows or plans to expand, scalable tools are essential for saving time, money, and headaches. Scalability prevents performance bottlenecks that occur when a business’s database tools and infrastructure can’t meet increased demand.

Without scalability, you could face inefficiencies, higher maintenance costs, and potential system failures.

Databases supported by scalable server infrastructure are essential for large businesses. They provide the flexibility to expand without outgrowing IT hardware. However, rigid tools that don’t scale can hinder effective management and monitoring of hardware and data. Scalable infrastructure allows continuous growth and efficient handling of increasing data loads.

A key part of managing a company database system is knowing when to expand or adjust your system—whether by increasing the number of instances, changing the platform, or making other structural changes. Scalable DBA tools support growth by monitoring and managing large-scale databases across hundreds or thousands of servers. 

When you’re thinking about scaling, ask yourself the following questions: 

• When should you make changes to database size?  

• Will the business could benefit from IT infrastructure expansion? If so, calcalate some hard numbers. 

• Where are the system bottlenecks? 

• How can scaling help you fix those bottlenecks? 

When focusing on scaling, there are several features essential for a database management tool that give you room to grow and confidence. 

A distributed dbWatch server architecture lets you distribute the load over multiple dbWatch servers or put the dbWatch servers behind firewalls or on different sites. This will spread the load and transparently reduce complexity with segmented and firewalled networks from the monitoring station and DBAs.

With extensive estates, you need views and tools that give you global overviews of all your instances. Then you can sort the lists to see where the biggest loads are quick, the most disk or memory usage, most giant lock or waits for issues, or any other parameter. You need – and get – the flexibility to analyze your entire estate in any way you need to get the information you need.​

When dealing with hundreds or thousands of instances, you need to organize them flexibly. With dbWatch, you can make arbitrary groups, like Development/Test/Operations, Sales/Production/Finance, location, or platform – the choice is yours. Further, you can tag any instance with your properties and make arbitrary groups based on those. Whichever way you want it, with dbWatch, you can organize your instances the way you want them. Flexible and powerful.

You want to control access if you have a large estate, perhaps in multiple locations and timezones. With dbWatch, you can create role-based access and manage different roles in other parts of your estate. A flexible and powerful access control scheme supporting Active Directory, Kerberos, and certificates/encrypted connections makes this easy to set up and maintain.

You need the same fast response when you monitor ten or a thousand instances. Also, there is no performance degradation on the network or central repository. (Hint: we use a distributed storage and server architecture to minimize load and performance issues)Toggle Content