 How to Keep Your Database Healthy
By David King, CEO of Fulcrum
Like a new house or car, a database begins to fall
apart the day it is completed. To help keep your
database healthy, I've selected three simple
maintenance ideas that will help maintain the
longevity of your database.
1. Name a data czar. A tremendous amount of
care and attention goes into data quality during the
development of a new database. And for some time
after it goes live, there is still frequent checking
of the data to make sure that update processes are
working properly. But once everyone is reasonably
confident in the data, attention is likely to wane
and errors will begin to creep into the database.
To avoid this, make checking data quality someone's
job. That person should check key values after each
database update and flag any anomalies. They should
also have a formal mechanism to report problems, and
the organization should be committed to fixing them
quickly. Be sure to reward the person doing this
job: either informally through public praise, or as
part of their performance-related compensation.
Fortunately, if this job is performed well, it
should consume relatively little time.
2. Ditch the boat anchors. Even the biggest
database servers eventually become outdated and
slow. The old answer used to be replacing a server
with an even bigger (and more expensive) one. It
may be time to throw the big iron boat anchors
overboard.
Fortunately, today's hardware and database
technology make upgrading easier. In particular,
something called clustering technology is now a
mainstream option. In a clustered environment,
smaller servers are harnessed together to manage a
database. The database management software controls
the separate physical servers as if they were a much
larger machine.
This allows your company to buy relatively
inexpensive hardware and to add servers as you need
for computing power increases. If your IT group is
telling you that your server is outdated, ask them
about clustering as an alternative.
3. Stop archiving. That's right: stop
throwing data away. Archiving older data is a
practice from a time when disk storage was
expensive. Let me give you an example: in 1999, our
company purchased a two-terabyte storage array for
over $1 million. In 2004, we replaced that system
with another with twice the capacity for a tenth of
the cost. Today, you can buy a two-terabyte storage
unit for about $1,000.
Believers in archiving also argue that keeping older
data will make queries run longer. But today, all of
the major database systems provide the ability to
partition your data in ways that avoid such
problems.
Yet the practice of removing old data persists. It
is also common among some service bureaus who charge
a hefty premium to clients that want more than a
year of history. If your internal group or a vendor
insists that keeping history is too expensive, give
them a lesson on Moore's law.
By paying regular attention to the condition of
your data, making quick repairs when something goes
wrong, and making prudent upgrades when needed, you
can maintain a healthy marketing database for years
to come.
---Source: DM News April 9, 2008 (www.dmnews.com).
David King is CEO of Fulcrum. Reach him at dking@fulcrum.com.
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