How can you regularly benchmark your database and application infrastructure against real-life? Why would you want to?

Insight-as-a-Service, the new IaaS.

In the age of big data, public cloud, private cloud [the marketing of which is starting to make many a CIO yawn] it’s easy to be pushed into constantly thinking about the future. However, as Team GB cyclists discovered over many years, it’s often incremental improvements that make a real difference to performance. Agile methodology for sport if you will. So whilst many companies are being encouraged to migrate lock, stock and barrel to a cloud infrastructure (and if you’re building from scratch then why not?), your current production database environment may benefit instead from a multitude of small optimisations. What should you optimise though and how can you be sure it’ll make a difference? Would knowing it could give you a competitive edge be worth considering?

Insight = informed decision making to increase the probability of success

Having supported and ‘touched’ over 20,000 database infrastructures during a 15-year period, we at DSP like to think we’ve amassed substantial expertise; however, whilst knowledge stored in people or files is useful it’s not always transformational. We believe insight comes from continuous analysis of data across similar systems, industries and geographies, then individually applying the findings. Each new implementation we deliver and each new client incident we fix provides real-time benefits to an entire client base.

By way of example, who wouldn’t want to know if their mission-critical, client facing application had a below average recovery time when compared to their peers? Even better, wouldn’t it be good to know (through anonymised data of course) the differences in architecture that may be behind this? What about avoiding the downtime that others have experienced and then fixed – we call this approach to service delivery “Preventative Analytics”.

Of course consultancies can and do deliver benchmarking engagements, but they are typically one-offs. How much quicker could you react to change if insight was delivered in real-time as new information is unearthed, new technologies emerge and better ways of working are tested and then implemented?

DSP Insight can be run as a standalone solution to help you optimise by increments, but ever more regularly it forms the cornerstone of our NexGen Database Managed Services, along with our Continuous Proactivity toolset and our extensive ranks of grizzled veteran DBAs (i.e. highly skilled) with knowledge that spans Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, MongoDB and PostgreSQL.