by Buda Consulting | Dec 20, 2022 | Uncategorized
Any company needs its SQL Server databases running efficiently to meet business objectives. But SQL Server DBA skills are most likely not an organizational core competency and potentially can be outsourced to a remote SQL Server DBA.
Is outsourcing SQL server management a good idea strategically for your organization? Outsourcing is often viewed through the lens of cost. But there are many reasons (9 of which follow) to consider a remote server DBA:
One: Reduced SQL Server DBA costs
Remote SQL Server DBA costs generally run about 25% to 50% less than in-house DBA total costs, according to Forrester Consulting.
Two: Improved quality of database administration
Many SQL Server DBA outsourcers report that their remote SQL Server DBA arrangement has resulted in an improved ability to meet service level agreements (SLAs) plus improved service quality as reported by users.
Three: Improved focus on the business
Leveraging a remote SQL Server DBA enables outsourcers to focus more on their core business issues and strategy by freeing up technical and management resources that had been focused on database administration.
Four: Augments in-house staff
Outsourcing SQL Server database admin liberates in-house IT staff from routine DBA tasks so they can solve other problems, which improves overall efficiency and productivity (not to mention morale). Many SQL Server DBAs also provide support outside of normal business hours when in-house staff may not be available, thus improving overall DBA coverage.
Five: The increased pool of expertise
Most remote DBA vendors employ a full team of experienced DBAs whose collective knowledge and experience would typically surpass that of a given individual DBA. Remote team members frequently pool their resources to identify the best solutions for customers. They effectively constitute a team of on-call specialists to provide the expertise you need on demand.
Six: Better database security
More automation combined with 24×7 monitoring inherently improves database security and uptime. So does the added level of security expertise that your remote SQL Server DBA team brings to the table. Finally, a remote DBA service will perform upgrades, patching, and maintenance tasks that help reduce vulnerabilities and keep data secure.
Seven: Improved business continuity
Your database administration function is key to ensuring that system issues don’t cascade into failures that impact users, customers, etc. Having extra eyes on your SQL Server environment helps proactively prevent database issues and limits their spread and impact.
Eight: Less loss of “institutional knowledge”
When a key IT employee like a DBA leaves your business, they may take with them a wealth of institutional knowledge that is now lost to you. A remote Server DBA relationship helps ensure that your environment is consistently handled in a best-practice manner, without the glitches and delays that commonly occur when you need to replace a full-time employee.
Nine: Enhanced data integrity
A remote SQL Server DBA service will most likely give you the option to perform data cleansing; eliminate duplicate, incorrect, or missing data; and so on. This improves the quality and integrity of your data and enhances its value for decision-making.
Next steps
Buda Consulting has provided best-in-class remote and on-site DBA services for SQL Server and other database environments for over 25 years. Our certified professional staff can manage the most sophisticated database architectures. Based on your needs, we can operate as a “best-fit” extension of your team to deliver the perfect complement of database-managed services—from taking over routine tasks to addressing advanced issues.
Contact Buda Consulting to talk about your SQL Server DBA needs and explore how our remote DBA service can help.
by Buda Consulting | Dec 7, 2022 | Oracle
There’s never a convenient time for a database emergency. When bad things happen to critical database systems—like alarming error messages, poor performance, potential data loss, or a possible security breach —you need to troubleshoot and mitigate the problem fast.
Keep a Trusted Oracle Database Expert on Your Team.
One: Time is money
Time is certainly money when critical systems are offline. User productivity is zero, customers can’t connect, your reputation is sinking, and so on. Research puts the true cost of IT downtime at somewhere between $2,500 and $9,000 per minute for SMEs ($150,000/hour and up) on average, depending on your industry, business size and other factors.
Even if you guesstimate your actual downtime costs would fall below that range, how many minutes of downtime would it take before whatever DBA service agreement costs you saved are consumed?
Further, you can expect an emergency Oracle Database expert service to charge a premium to save the day. And no matter how good they are, they will be starting with no knowledge of your business or your systems. You’ll be paying a high cost for their ramp-up time.
A trusted remote DBA partner will already know your database environment, so they can potentially solve your problem in less time while also charging less for their time.
Two: Who are these people?
When your critical data is inaccessible you don’t have time to run background checks. If you’re cold-calling an emergency Oracle Database expert, how do you know you can trust them (and whoever is working for them) to keep your sensitive data private? Will their monitoring and support techniques comply with regulations you’re subject to? Do you even know for sure what country the people who will be remotely accessing your systems are located in?
You don’t want to compound a data access crisis with a compliance blunder and/or security breach.
When you have a service agreement with a trusted DBA partner, you’ll know from experience that they are trustworthy, what measures they keep in place to preserve your security, how they address your compliance requirements, and so on.
Three: Proactive trumps reactive
Many third-party DBAs offer proactive service packages that will detect and correct many impending issues before they crash your database or otherwise impact users. This “extra insurance” of a wise eye on your database environment is another big advantage to having a working relationship with an Oracle Database expert. Versus a “break-fix” approach on an expensive emergency basis.
If an emergency does happen on your DBA partner’s watch, they probably offer 24×7 on-call assistance. So, they can start addressing mission-critical production database problems within minutes. Which is most likely faster than starting from scratch looking for a service provider.
Next steps to Finding an Oracle Database Expert
If your critical production databases are not currently protected by an on-call Oracle Database expert, contact Buda Consulting to explore how our DBA support options can enhance your business performance and IT continuity.
Ask us why we never charge for emergency response when you have a service agreement with us. And ask us why you will always have at least two U.S. Based Database Experts that know your environment.
by Buda Consulting | Nov 1, 2022 | Backup and Recovery
Every business needs proper IT disaster recovery planning as part of its overall business continuity plan. You might think you don’t need to plan for disaster recovery because disasters like floods and fires are so uncommon. But the top reason for IT disasters and significant unplanned downtime is human error: clicking a malicious link, accidentally deleting critical data, misconfiguring systems causing failures, etc. Other top IT disaster causes include commonplace occurrences like software bugs, hardware failures, power outages, and cyberattacks (including insider threats). Natural disasters are at the bottom of the list.
If you don’t have an IT disaster recovery plan, your recovery attempts will be chaotic and take much longer than if your team follows a well-considered, up-to-date plan that they are at least somewhat familiar with. Just a few hours of downtime impacts employee productivity and customer experience, leading to lost revenue and reputational damage. Days of downtime can threaten an SMB’s ongoing viability.
What does proper IT disaster recovery planning look like?
An IT disaster recovery plan describes your IT disaster recovery strategy and key goals and lists your IT disaster recovery procedures. Its purpose is to help your company take appropriate action to quickly recover IT operations and protect data. That means bringing critical systems back online in the right order, taking steps to reduce or eliminate data loss, and minimizing downtime for physical server hardware, user workstations, databases, etc.
A typical SMB IT disaster recovery plan has at least these core elements:
- Description of recovery goals, such as the recovery time objective (RTO) for each critical IT system, and the recovery point objective (RPO), which is the maximum amount of acceptable data loss as a function of time. You also need to define what constitutes a disaster and when to invoke your IT disaster recovery plan.
- Recovery team assignments who is responsible for carrying out the IT disaster recovery plan, and who are their backups if they are unavailable? How will they be notified when a disaster occurs? Where will they work, how will they communicate, etc.?
- IT system recovery procedures. These are your emergency response steps, including what systems will be recovered first and in what order.
- Incident response procedures to contain the damage from ransomware and other malware (e.g., isolating infected systems).
- Data backup/recovery procedures. Exactly how and where is each key data resource backed up, and what are the corresponding recovery steps?
- IT asset inventory a detailed list of hardware and software/application assets, including their criticality rating, where they reside (on-premises, cloud-based), and whether they are owned, leased, purchased as-a-service, etc. You can’t recover what you don’t know exists.
- Testing procedures. Regular testing and updating of your IT disaster recovery plan is key to efficient, successful recovery. This includes tabletop exercises and read-throughs of the plan, not just full-on simulations. A best practice is to review your IT disaster recovery plan quarterly or twice annually to keep it current with your ever-changing IT environment, staffing, and business goals.
- Disaster recovery sites. If your IT disaster recovery plan includes failing over to a remote hot site, or recovering from a mobile site, you should include those details in a separate section of your plan. For example: What replicas and backups are you maintaining via the hot site? What software, services, vendors, etc. are involved to maintain and operate the hot site setup?
How do you construct an IT disaster recovery plan?
Building an IT disaster recovery plan takes careful research and discussion among all stakeholders. You should holistically understand your business needs, as well as your risk profile.
Therefore, conducting a risk assessment to identify top threats your organization faces, including specific threats to critical assets like your intellectual property, is a key initial step. You must also interview people who work with essential systems to understand what those systems do and what inputs and connections they depend on.
As you develop a holistic, prioritized understanding of IT operations, you can connect with technical and business leaders to discuss the impacts of interruptions to various critical systems. This input serves as the basis for key recovery metrics like your RTO and RPO.
Finally, based on your analysis of assets, risks to those assets, and your recovery objectives, you can plan a disaster recovery configuration. For example, do you need a cloud-based/hosted hot failover site? What backup and replication scenarios are most critical (e.g., the backup plan for your cloud-based ERP solution)? What software, services, vendors, etc. are needed to help you create the overall setup you need?
A best practice is to submits several options and price tags to management, to strike the optimal balance between recovery cost and disaster risk. Once management approves a plan, it’s time to communicate the plan around your organization and initiate training as needed.
The Database Component of IT Disaster Recovery Planning
Among the most important assets that your DR plan will protect are your databases and these require special consideration in your disaster recovery planning and testing. Databases may have their own D/R configuration such as hot or cold Standby databases using Oracle dataguard or SQL Server log shipping, or standby databases managed by DBVisit using either of those databases. In addition to testing switchover/failover to standby databases, proper database backup monitoring, protection, and testing must be part of your DR plan. A disaster recovery plan will fail if the backups that are part of the plan are compromised or not complete when the time comes to recover to them.
Next steps of IT Disaster Recovery Planning
Many companies cannot afford to face significant unplanned downtime and strive for continuous availability of critical systems like their website or ERP environment—including associated databases.
Buda Consulting understands how companies rely on databases and the importance of high availability to support quick database recovery and minimize the impacts of outages, interruptions, cyberattacks, natural disasters, etc.
Our Reliability Review service will help you evaluate your current risk scenario and help you determine the level of protection your business needs. Contact us to schedule a time to discuss your business needs and goals.
by Buda Consulting | Oct 25, 2022 | Performance Tuning
MySQL is a popular open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). It is frequently used to support large and/or complex applications, especially web applications. About 15% of all websites currently use MySQL for their databases.
With these kinds of large-scale applications, the sheer volume of data can create performance issues. Further, the complexity of a MySQL environment can result in performance issues cropping up seemingly out of nowhere, potentially impacting staff productivity and/or customer experience.
Therefore, it is critically important for businesses of all sizes across industries to prioritize MySQL performance tuning. Even common, seemingly minor coding errors or misconfigurations can lead to MySQL database problems, including unstable and inconsistent performance.
What is MySQL performance tuning?
“Tuning” a MySQL database means enhancing it so that query response times are optimized. This can lead to faster load times and better overall responsiveness for websites, as well as the reduced processing time for analytics queries and other business tasks.
MySQL performance tuning isn’t confined to optimizing your database code, commands, and tables. It can also include system optimizations to make sure that sufficient resources are available for your MySQL processes. System optimization steps we frequently recommend include:
- Checking parameters like load averages and I/O utilization to ensure current virtual machines (VMs) have sufficient resources for your MySQL workloads.
- Checking disk configuration and utilization for each MySQL host.
- Checking the process list for each MySQL system.
- Checking whether any MySQL instances are using swap space. This can point to unseen problems.
- Isolating MySQL processes on their own virtual machines.
Fine-tuning and standardizing your MySQL configuration files can also improve performance. Some of the configuration settings that have the greatest impact on MySQL performance include: key_buffer_size, innodb_log_file_size, log_slave_updates (usually best set to “off”), max_connect_errors, max_connections, and wait_timeout.
What benefits can you get from MySQL performance tuning?
Some of the benefits you can expect from MySQL performance tuning include:
- Improved data retrieval speed. The more data you are working with, the slower data retrieval can become, especially if your database is not optimized. With MySQL performance tuning, users will experience reduced wait times on searches.
- Better MySQL query performance. There are multiple best practices for improving query performance, such as not overusing SELECT, avoiding correlated subqueries and minimizing the use of temporary tables. These efficiency improvements enable your database to scale with growing data volumes so you’re not constantly running into performance problems as your database gets more use.
- Elimination of coding loops. A coding loop is basically an SQL query inside a loop, which causes the query to run multiple times. When coding loops run, they can severely impact database performance. Moving the query out of the loop should eliminate the problem.
Next steps
While many organizations have databases, there is a shortage of experienced DBAs who can efficiently keep up with MySQL performance tuning as your environment and workloads change. MySQL performance tuning is a job for specialists who have in-depth knowledge of the complexities involved and can apply best practices to address them.
With skilled DBAs at a premium, outsourcing your MySQL performance tuning is a good choice for many companies. Buda Consulting’s team of performance-tuning specialists will apply a systematic approach to your unique scenario that can yield exceptional performance gains while also improving database reliability. Many MySQL instances we review are under-tuned and can be quickly improved.
For help with detecting, diagnosing, and resolving MySQL performance problems across your physical, virtualized and cloud-based database servers, contact Buda Consulting.
by Buda Consulting | Oct 12, 2022 | Best Practices, Database Maintenance
Many SMBs today look to establish and maintain a core IT team that has the expertise and agility to respond to business demands, such as developing and updating custom applications. For non-core/maintenance processes like database administration, there are many benefits to partnering with third-party experts who can handle these time-consuming, specialized tasks reliably and efficiently. This is why remote DBA services have become one of the most prevalent forms of IT outsourcing.
What are remote DBA services?
Remote DBA services can cover a wide range of everyday database tasks, including:
- Database administration (e.g., user administration and space management)
- Performance monitoring and tuning
- 24×7 database support
- Report development
- Database health checks and troubleshooting
- Database security monitoring
- Database upgrades
Here are 5 ways that remote DBA services can benefit your business.
One: Save money and reduce business risk associated with hiring skilled technical resources
Demand for skilled DBAs exceeds supply and salaries are averaging well above $100,000 plus benefits. Hiring qualified technical staff is time-consuming, challenging for HR staff, and risky due to high turnover and potential competence issues. The cost to engage remote DBA services is generally 40% to 60% lower than hiring a full-time employee. Further, a remote DBA services team can offer specialized skills and up-to-date product knowledge on demand that the individual you hire may not have.
Two: Better staff continuity
Ironically, high turnover and poor retention of skilled technical resources mean that many businesses get better staff continuity and knowledge transfer by leveraging remote DBA services than by hiring in-house DBAs. At a minimum, leveraging remote DBA services means you can rest assured of continuity of services, without the risk of losing a key DBA and being left without that critical resource. You’re also less likely to be impacted by inevitable issues like vacations, maternity leave, illness, etc. Many remote DBA services offer 24×7 coverage for your environment, with rapid response in emergencies.
Three: Improved database operations
Especially for SMBs struggling to cover critical database tasks, relying on remote DBA services can improve your database availability and performance. Remote DBAs have your database environment as their top priority and can be more proactive about improving service levels versus reacting to problems in a break-fix manner when they manifest. For example, database health checks are key to ensuring maximum uptime for your critical databases. But these can be complex to organize and perform to avoid impacting users and workloads. Remote DBA services can ensure that health checks and other maintenance and administrative tasks are performed routinely and efficiently.
Four: Increased scalability
As your business grows or your specific database needs change, you might find you need to augment current database staffing. A remote DBA services arrangement makes it easy to get more bandwidth and/or additional expertise without the extensive cost and time required for a full-time hire. A remote DBA can also support your business to scale up by ensuring that your database can handle increasing amounts of data and transactions.
Five: Improved database security
Information security is a specialty discipline, and database security is a specialty within that specialty. Many DBAs don’t have these hard-to-find skills, which results in critical data being vulnerable to cyber-attack. Your business may also be out of compliance with security requirements in applicable regulations like HIPAA, PCI-DSS, Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), etc. A remote DBA service can help improve your database security by applying best practices, including helping you develop strong security policies, patching your database environment, auditing your databases for vulnerabilities with automated tools, and reviewing user and administrative rights and privileges.
Next Steps For Remote DBA Services
Buda Consulting has been a preferred remote DBA services partner to global brands and SMBs for Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, and other database technologies for over 25 years. Our staff consists of certified database professionals capable of managing the most sophisticated database architectures. Contact us to talk about your database requirements and how Buda Consulting can help.
