Three Top Database Strategies

Choosing a database is one of the most critical decisions your business will ever make. It goes without saying that the right database can foster growth, while the wrong one can limit it. And it is a decision that is not easily reversible. If your database isn’t meeting your needs, moving to a new one can be a time-consuming and expensive undertaking. Then again, if your database isn’t meeting your needs, it hardly matters how difficult it might be to migrate to a new one. If you want your business to thrive, you have no real choice.
No database is “better” than another, but every database is more or less appropriate to your needs. Your needs are determined by

  • types of data to be used and stored
  • size and structure of databases
  • performance requirements
  • existing technology
  • relations with vendors
  • anticipated growth of data needs
  • types of decisions that drive your business.

Once you have a complete picture of your database needs, you can begin to search for the database you need. It will be a comprehensive process, but you can get started by learning the strategies of the various database system providers.

Microsoft SQL Server, for example, is designed for performance and for seamless operation in both the cloud and on-premises. It accelerates mission-critical applications by fitting tables entirely in memory, thus avoiding the read-write activity that slows disk-based databases. Some queries are 100 times faster than older legacy solutions. Microsoft also built this software with an eye to security. Microsoft SQL Server has been named the most secure database five years in a row by the Comprehensive Vulnerability Database of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

SQL Server allows multiple users to use the same data concurrently and ensures data integrity with row-level locking. Files can be up to 16 terabytes, and the maximum table size is 524,272 terabytes. Designed to work in a cloud/on-premise hybrid environment, it makes your data available anywhere you go.

Oracle Database makes consolidating databases quick and simple. In addition, its multi-tenant architecture makes cloud services both stable and scalable. This database also includes in-memory data processing capabilities that deliver a breakthrough analytical performance. It pools data in memory and consolidates file changes to do them altogether, which provides for superior performance.

Oracle is ported to more platforms than any of its competition, as it runs on more than 100 different hardware platforms and 20 different network protocols. Writing an Oracle application is safe from changes in direction in both hardware and software. Backup, recovery, and fault tolerance are among the best of any database. Oracle has a superior ability to manage multiple databases within the same transactions using various protocols. It is simple for users to move data to where it is needed from node to node and with data mirroring. Both file size and database size are unlimited.

SAP Sybase optimizes its offerings with specialized editions. SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) is intended for mission-critical applications. It is designed to accelerate transaction-intensive multiuser applications at low cost. It features in-memory computing, high-volume data replications, and simple but sophisticated administration. It handles massive volumes of data and thousands of concurrent users.

Where ASE is designed for transactions, SAP IQ is intended for business intelligence and data warehousing, which it simplifies with an in-memory data fabric architecture. It is known for scalability and performance. Its column-store design can provide performance improvements over row-based systems, which often must read an entire table to retrieve a storage object.

To SAP IQ’s scalability and performance, SAP HANA adds the speed of in-memory processing for operational reporting. Together, SAP IQ and SAP HANA provide a distributed in-memory analytics platform, suited to sophisticated planning and decision making supported by extremely large quantities of data.

Your business’s database strategy must be developed with consideration for the varying database technologies that are available on the market and how they can be used to support the data used by your business. In other words, you need to develop a comprehensive database strategy and find a database offering that fits it. It can be a daunting process, and the stakes are very high. There is an alternative, however: Spinnaker Support database strategy development services.

We can help you develop a comprehensive database strategy. Our team will work with your IT department to help devise a plan that will meet the demand of each division of your company. Our team of experts understands the features, benefits, tricks, and trends that are characteristic to each database available on the market. These insights allow us to ensure that your database strategy will be implementable, will perform as planned, and will support rather than limit the growth of your business.

Remote Database Service: Empowerment For Your DBA

Consider your database administrator (DBA). Most DBAs spend their workdays on capacity planning, installation, configuration, migration, performance monitoring, security, troubleshooting, backup, and data recovery — after they have resolved all the trouble tickets and answered all the panic-stricken user calls.

How much more rewarding would the DBA’s job be if she were able to spend her time on database design, data architecture, and aligning your database with the needs of your business? How much more productive would your business be if the DBA were freed from the tasks of logging file management, database sizing, service pack upgrades, and service patches?

The Spinnaker Support Remote DBA Service, SpectrumDB, relieves the DBA of all that busy work and refocuses his job on the mission of your business. In other words, it elevates both the DBA’s vision of the enterprise and his responsibility for its success.

Frankly, we sometimes find the DBA to be the greatest skeptics of the implementation of the Remote Data Service. Some DBAs fear that losing control of the infrastructure work will make their jobs less important or secure. In reality, the opposite is true. Here are some of the low-level responsibilities that the Spinnaker Support Remote DBA Service, SpectrumDB, eliminates for your DBA:

  • licensing
  • certifications
  • maintenance
  • support
  • capacity planning
  • performance issues
  • monitoring
  • trouble tickets

That is why we say that Spinnaker Support Remote Data Service empowers your DBA. A DBA who takes responsibility for aligning the database with your business converts a job focused on maintenance to one with a much wider vision. And that means a future with fewer limitations and more responsibility.

But Spinnaker Support Remote DBA Service doesn’t just empower the DBA. It makes sense for the business, too. Look at it this way. When you need electricity, you don’t build a power plant, you stick a plug into an outlet and buy only as much as you need. Why deal with power phases, load profiles, transmission issues, atmospheric emissions, or line maintenance when the power company already does it? Your Spinnaker Support Remote DBA Service works by a similar principle to serve the database needs of your business. It eliminates the management of infrastructure and platforms.

Your Spinnaker Support Remote DBA Service is one of the most flexible in the business. It is geared towards small and medium businesses that have one or more applications running on one or more servers. It covers a wide range of platforms:

  • SAP Sybase ASE
  • SAP Sybase IQ
  • SAP Sybase Replication Server
  • SAP SQL Anywhere
  • Microsoft SQL Server
  • Microsoft SharePoint
  • MySQL
  • Oracle
  • MongoDB

Once your organization has enrolled in the service, production, development, and testing are there at your disposal, and because you only use what you need at the time you need it, you get it all at a lower cost than you have ever experienced.

Unlike other managed service setups, Spinnaker Support’s approach to managed services is change-record free. In many cases, adding additional servers to infrastructure will not result in higher fees.

Your Spinnaker Support remote database team has developed monitoring to high art, and they know how to keep system alerts from becoming performance problems, so downtime is dramatically reduced. The few issues that do arise are typically fixed within a short period of time.

All of this translates to a more focused business, and empowerment for your DBA to assume a more mission-critical role in the business.

Reducing Oracle Support Spend – An Interview with Nigel Pullan

Recently, Kay Williams at Madora Consulting interviewed me for their podcast series. Madora helps Oracle users understand the complexities of Oracle licensing and improve their licensing position. While Spinnaker Support doesn’t have a formal relationship with Madora, we do share a common goal of helping Oracle support customers optimize their Oracle spend.

Kay and I really got to the heart of how to reduce Oracle support costs using Spinnaker Support as a third-party solution. Below, you will find a link to the podcast where you will learn:

  • Why a customer should choose Spinnaker Support as an Oracle alternative
  • How Spinnaker Support’s costs compare to Oracle’s
  • How Spinnaker Support actually works
  • More about the process of transition from Oracle to Spinnaker Support

I very much enjoyed my discussion with Kay. My only regret is that we didn’t have more time to talk! That being said, I’d like to address some frequently asked questions Kay and I did not have enough time to address during our discussion.

What are the most common reasons customers switch to Oracle support alternatives?

Oracle customers move to third-party support for a variety of reasons, but the most common one is a lack of value. Customers don’t feel that they are getting the return on investment for the money they pay to Oracle each year.

While Oracle’s costs are rising, the quality of support is not rising along with those costs. In fact, many customers feel the quality of support has gone down. The consolidation of support centers to lower cost geographies signals that support will most likely continue the downward trend.

Lastly, new versions of Oracle do not deliver the relevance of the functionality as they did in the past. Today, most of Oracle’s investments are going toward cloud applications. For customers what aren’t ready to be pushed that way, there is a value in staying with their current version and moving toward a third-party support solution such as Spinnaker Support while reducing costs.

What is Oracle’s response to losing a customer to third-party support?

Oracle does accept third-party support as a viable alternative. However, Oracle does not like losing customers and has been known to threaten customers with financial penalties if they ever want to return to Oracle support. In our experience, we have not seen that happen; Oracle will welcome a customer back to the fold rather than lose them to a competitor.

How do Spinnaker Support’s services compare to the competition?

Spinnaker Support offers a broader range of services than our competitors. In addition to offering high-quality support and maintenance services, Spinnaker Support has a consulting division and divisions offering AMS and TMS services that customers frequently use as an extension of their maintenance services. Lastly, we make sure that our services remain in line with Intellectual Property laws and adhere to Global Tax and Regulatory Compliance standards. Spinnaker Support has never been sued and found liable by Oracle, or anyone else, for infringement or fraud.

What Is An Emergency Data Services Contract?

In decades of helping firms recover data, we have come to believe there must be almost as many ways to lose data as there are data users. We have seen data lost through

  • deliberate action (“I thought I didn’t need that file, and I deleted it.”)
  • unintentional action (“I don’t know what I did, but the system deleted it.”)
  • power failure (“I didn’t save before the power went out.”)
  • hardware failure (“My disk crashed.”)
  • software failure (“Everything just froze, and now I can’t find that file.”)
  • software-induced user failure (“Wasn’t it supposed to ask me before doing that?”)
  • business failure (“They were storing our data, and they went bankrupt.”)
  • file corruption (“This file was fine last week. Now the system can’t read it.”)
  • incompatibility (“I upgraded the application, and it won’t read the old files.”)
  • disaster (“The earthquake wrecked our server.”)
  • crime (“We’ve been hacked. Somebody stole our hardware.”)
  • sabotage (“I didn’t realize he had access to those files when I disciplined him.”)

And we are sure we haven’t seen it all. In addition to the sheer variety of dangers your database faces from day to day, the possibilities for data loss seem to increase with every advance in technology.

A non-functioning database could cause your business to come to a screeching halt. Poor performance, corrupt databases, and broken SQL Server processes are just a few of the disasters lying in wait.

Database vendors improved their software over the years to make them more stable. In the early days, the slightest blip in hardware issues could cause major data losses due to database corruption. These days are thankfully behind us. Today the threat of database corruption is mainly from user error or issues during upgrades of databases. Every time there are changes to the structure of a database, data corruption is always a threat. Always backup the database before attempting a database upgrade.

EMC’s 2013 IT Trust Curve Survey, a study based on 3,200 respondents in 16 countries, found the average cost of a data loss incident to be $585,892 in lost revenue alone. That doesn’t include the additional costs of lost employee productivity, lost customers, remediation, regulatory noncompliance, or lawsuits. The magnitude of the cost is not surprising. A web-based retailer, for example, could lose revenue every second its database is down. There are many web-based retailers to choose from, and web-oriented shoppers are, as a rule, both impatient and unforgiving. Wise web retailers don’t count on customer loyalty.

To some extent, the costs of a data loss are proportional to the competitiveness of your business. If you’re running the ticket desk of an airline in an isolated airport served by no other airlines and your database goes out for an hour or two, you will have to deal with frustrated passengers, but you probably won’t lose too many. If, on the other hand, you’re running an airline ticket desk at Miami International and your system goes down, you can actually watch your revenue walking away as your passengers get out of your ticket line to seek other airlines. In such a case, you’re talking about thousands of dollars per second in revenue that will never return.

Maybe you’re not running a ticket desk at Miami International, but you probably have a pretty good idea of how much revenue your business generates per hour. That, plus the costs of repair, remediation, lawsuits, and customer ill will make up your per-hour cost of unexpected data loss.

The best way to avoid catastrophe and the need for emergency services is to talk to Spinnaker Support about an Emergency Data Services Contract. After we fully assess your system, we will be able to help you build an affordable support program that meets your needs. Our team of experts is standing by at all hours to assist you in the event of a database emergency.

The experts at Spinnaker Support will help create solutions and fixes to solve potentially disastrous database problems before they become huge issues (and revenue loss!). Through an analysis of the root cause, Spinnaker Support is able to provide short-term remediation and rapid identification of performance or process issues that may make you vulnerable to data loss.

Because of the collected knowledge of your system prior a potential emergency allows us to expedite the troubleshooting process and can

  • Reduce downtime during periods of maintenance
  • Restore database environment to normal functionality
  • Offer rapid turnaround for minimized business disruption

If you’re in the midst of an emergency, you are performing crisis management, whether you like it or not. Call us. We can help. If you’re not in the midst of an emergency, plan for one. Risk management is always easier and cheaper than crisis management.