“A guarantee that your DBAs and IT managers will attain higher consistency in DBA service delivery, giving your organization competitive advantage. Data Palette accomplishes this by enabling (a) standardization, (b) centralization and (c) automation of repetitive, yet time-consuming DBA tasks. Oh, you also get full audit capabilities, and your DBAs can sleep at night.

Let’s look at each part in detail, starting with standardization. The typical DBA puts in closer to a 50 or 60-hour week than a 40-hour one. Despite working these extended hours, DBAs often find themselves in firefighting and reactive mode, and doing little to address the root cause of problems. Much of their effort goes into problem diagnosis and applying similar fixes over and over again – to the plethora of servers and databases that DBAs are asked to manage today. Moreover, the organization unfairly begins to rely on specific individuals to address specific problems, so that ‘DBA’ and ‘Vacation’ are not spoken in the same breath and uninterrupted downtime when sick is something a DBA can merely long for.

But in reality, many of these repetitive work patterns can be reduced to pre-approved “task recipes”, that can then be used by everyone in the team; in fact, even by less senior personnel such as Tier 1/Help Desk or night-time operators. Standardization is key to making the environment more predictable and spreading the workload better across more individuals. 

Next is centralization. By centralizing their task methods and utilities, DBAs no longer have to battle isolated scripts, arcane log/trace outputs and disparate GUI tools. Scripts are fine, provided the DBA has the time to write and maintain them, and the number of target databases and servers being managed are few. But with DBA-time being scarce and the number of databases and servers going in an upward trajectory, relying on scripts becomes a major handicap.

Scripts have to reside directly on the target server they are meant to run on. The average script has lots of hard-coded values so they need to change with every change in the environment. Even when a single line of code has to change in a script (out of the 15 or so scripts the average DBA juggles in her toolbox!), it requires the DBA to manually log on to each of the servers, make the change and re-test – no small feat for even a few servers. That wee typo can wreak havoc on the environment. With Data Palette’s central console for rolling out and maintaining task recipes and automation routines, such heavy lifting and resultant accidents become a thing of the past!

Then finally, automation. The higher the standardization and centralization, the higher the chances of automating recurring and complex tasks. Once automated, problem responses and resolutions can be expedited and, in many cases, negative impact on users averted altogether (by triggering of the automated responses before the problems become apparent to the users). Automation also frees and diverts DBAs’ valuable time towards many proactive tasks that would not only reduce the frequency and intensity of daily fires, but would also allow these senior technicians to work a more normal lifestyle, reducing the risk of eventual burnout.

No doubt, there are some great monitoring/notification tools out there that allow DBAs to react to problems faster. These tools are backed by pretty-looking administrative GUIs that are getting better at presenting a more robust alternative to command-line interfaces. However, these tools don’t provide a platform for the kind of standardization, centralization and automation described here.

While an administrative GUI is useful to accelerate certain ad-hoc work via its nice point-and-click interface, someone still needs to get out of bed at 2:00 a.m. to respond to an alert regarding say, a nightly load process failure. The longer it takes to get out of bed and figure out the exact problem and apply the right fix, the more the business process is delayed!

When the typical DBA response is encapsulated into a process with a corresponding automation routine and executed autonomically in response to (or in anticipation of) a failure pattern, you get near-instantaneous response and resolution, and the DBA no longer has to sleep with one eye on the pager and one hand on the keyboard. And that peace of mind is exactly what Data Palette brings to DBAs and their managers, and what unfortunately, these custodians of complex production databases don’t have today.”

Venkat Devraj
Chief Architecht

Do you have a burning question you would like answered in next month’s DataBuzz?  Please contact our editor, Alison J. Macmillan

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