Data is the most valuable resource a federal agency can own. It’s currently being generated at an astonishing rate of 1.145 trillion MB per day, and market intelligence firm IDC predicts we’ll generate as much as 463 exabytes of data each day by 2025. This massive rise in data collection introduces new challenges in how agencies design, manage, and monitor databases to ensure they run at peak performance and can meet the mission-critical needs of end users.
Simultaneously, the technology landscape is also getting more complex. Technology professionals must navigate distributed workloads in a hybrid IT environment, manage database migrations as workloads move to the cloud, and understand database specialization spanning relational and NoSQL platforms—all on top of their day-to-day responsibilities.
Though the stakes and complexity of the role of IT professionals is increasing, the solution doesn’t have to be difficult or complex. Agencies can realize a dramatic difference through enhanced database management—a concept that is comprehensive of both database performance monitoring and DataOps.
In fact, there are several things agencies can do to enhance database management, performance, and speed, even in light of a dramatically increasing data load. One of the most important aspects is database performance tuning.
Optimizing Your Database Performance
How can you do this? There are several opportunities for database performance tuning capable of having a dramatically positive impact.
Let’s start with response time analysis—the database optimization piece of the equation. Response time analysis helps database administrators (DBAs) identify and measure an end-to-end process, starting with a query request from the end user, ending with a query response, and including the time spent at each discrete step in between. This helps identify bottlenecks, pinpoint root causes, and prioritize actions based on the impact poor database performance has on end users.
Response time analysis is a pragmatic approach to tuning and optimizing database performance, allowing the database team to more easily identify issues and deliver measurable results.
Once the team has committed to implementing response time analysis, next up is ensuring indexes are implementing a logical data structure to make the data retrieval process more efficient—a key component of database performance monitoring. An indexing strategy is one of the toughest problems a DBA can face. The tendency is to index an object instead of indexing for how it’s going to be queried. This often leads to too many indexes on the underlying objects, which can cause regression. A database performance management solution can help you identify missing and duplicate indexes faster so you can improve database performance.
Other tasks the IT team can perform to help enhance database performance include the following:
- Reallocate the computing system’s memory reserves. When there’s not enough memory available, databases are often hit hardest.
- Ensure the team is using the latest version of MySQL or Oracle. Sometimes, keeping the database up-to-date is all it takes to improve database performance.
- Avoid common SQL index pitfalls like coding loops and correlated SQL sub-queries.
- Defragmenting data might help speed up the database. Make sure there’s enough disk space.
- When preparing for cloud migrations, understand how your agency’s data environment is visually structured. A database solution can help the team compare, synchronize, script, and navigate data and schemas to drive efficiency and productivity.
Database performance tuning helps re-optimize a database system from top to bottom—and from software to hardware—to improve overall performance. The process can involve reconfiguring operating systems according to how they’re best used, deploying clusters, and working toward optimal database performance to support system function and end-user experience. No matter how many of these tasks your team implements, every little bit will help as our data demands continue to increase exponentially.
Try a free trial of the SolarWinds® Database Performance Analyzer to learn more about optimizing your database performance.
