Best Practices and Procedures for Database Administration

April 21, 2022
Jhansi Rani
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Published On April 21, 2022

With data becoming the lifeblood of your business, every organization must have well-managed databases. Having the right database management skills and following best practices for database administration services can impact the overall health of an organization and facilitate the health, availability, and performance of your databases.

How Automation is Transforming the Role of the DBA

With the proliferation of the cloud and the rise of AI & ML, databases are operating autonomously, and database administrators have to evolve along with this shift. Modern DBAs are evolving to become more strategic, turning into data engineers. For organizations to adapt to this shift to automation, they must understand that the contemporary DBA is more of an “architect” than just an “administrator.”

Regardless of how the cloud, AI, and other emerging technologies transform your database processes, the core tasks of your DBAs are critical to the health of your Oracle, SQL Server, and/or NoSQL databases. Automation frees up DBAs from routine maintenance tasks and lets them focus on opportunities to architect, upgrade, scale, and secure their database environments while optimizing costs.

Database Administration Best Practices

You must follow these best practices to ensure effective database administration services and for your DBAs to optimize database management.

Clearly Define Your Business Goals

It’s essential to outline your overall business goals within your organization and your database management team. First, you need to know how much you can spend on database management. This spend encompasses the types of databases (Oracle, SQL Server, NoSQL, MySQL, etc.), the staff, their expertise, and the deployment strategy best-suited for your databases. For example, you must strategically designate an amount to invest in your database management team and decide whether to have them in-house or as consultants or engage a Managed Services Partner. Depending on the company size and the amount of data, a DBA might be able to specialize in selected aspects of database management.

Your DBAs need to know your plan for the data collected and focus solely on the information relevant to the overall business goals. This helps them stay well-organized and operate smoothly. Understanding your organization’s business goals ensures that you keep only the valuable data to your organization and archive the rest, simplifying database maintenance.

Standardize Processes, Invest in Monitoring Tools, Ensure Data Quality

Establishing a set of policies and procedures for your database administration services is essential and includes:

Having maintenance plans to keep indexes and statistics current.
Routinely checking databases for corruption.
Deleting the files that no longer serve a purpose.

Data should also be checked for accuracy periodically and cleaned accordingly. You must have monitoring tools and alerts to warn you of any problems. Your DBA must establish them and are vital to your operations, keeping your databases running smoothly and addressing any issues promptly. You must also ensure that your monitoring and escalation strategies are suitable for all environments (on-premise, cloud, or hybrid). Train your DBAs on strategies to properly collect and organize the data. Having trained staff with the right skill set in this era of database automation prevents any database issues that could arise down the road and complicate your database environment. Data quality should be a top priority because critical decisions are made using the intelligence provided by your data.

Ensure Data Security, Establish Backup and Disaster Recovery Procedures

Data protection and security are top priorities for database administration services so that your organization does not suffer from a data breach and endanger your databases. Having a well-defined plan in place is vital when a potential breach occurs. In this era of multi-cloud deployment strategies, it’s crucial to ensure that your security architectures are designed to support all areas of your infrastructure (on-premises, private cloud, public cloud, or a hybrid cloud environment).

But accidents can occur, and therefore, you need to establish strong backup and disaster recovery procedures to prevent data loss. You can develop a maintenance plan that can automate your backup processes. Rite Software has a deep expertise in Oracle Database Cloud Services that helps you to control costs, reduce operational risk and optimize your database infrastructure.