Editorials

Tiers of Support

When it comes to a database engine and maintaining efficient performance you have four basic options.

  • Don’t do anything and take what the engine does by default
  • Host it with a provider that manages your installation
  • Outsource a professional service to manage your database as an add on service
  • Hire your own expertise

A lot of people get reliable performance with no support at all. I would presume this to be smaller databases with little load. The engine, right out of the box, has some performance optimization. For a database that doesn’t have unique designs or large amounts of data, the engine may work just fine out of the box. When it doesn’t you find yourself escalating to another support method with different degrees of support and expertise.

In some hosting platforms there is a degree of management. This is especially true when you are using a shared resource. If your database is dominating an instance of SQL Server, the hosting service will sometimes throttle back you database to keep the server online. You experience lower performance. In this scenario, though, you often have some degree of disaster recovery built into the hosting service. This saves you time and resources for creating, managing, and testing a disaster recovery plan.

When you need to really tune your database for performance, you may find yourself going to the next tier of support. You may not have enough work to hire an internal database administrator, and keep them busy all the time. Moreover, most DBA’s want to keep current with the latest release of any database engine so that their skills don’t become obsolete. In this case you may find it more expedient, even though the cost per hour may be higher, to outsource the management of your databases.

For those companies with enough database work, or individuals capable of performing other tasks, you may find it pays to have a permanent individual or team to manage your databases, even if they are hosted elsewhere.

I’m not exposing any big or new revelations here. Most managers would already understand this even if they don’t know anything about a data engine. As a database professional, it may be helpful for you to understand these tiers of service, allowing you to tweak or market your skills in ways that benefit all.

Cheers,

Ben