DB Consulting

Technological Upgrading

Technological Upgrading Projects have advantages not evident to most organizations, such as:

• Minimizing Operational Risk

• Premium Support

• New features that increase availability .

• Security Patches

• Avoiding and emergency migration, in case of running on an existing failure

• Taking better advantage of the investment.

• Adding new features (perfomance, administration, function)

• Adding atumatic improvements (without application changes)

• Allowing HW and SO updates (flexibility)

• Diminishing TCO thanks to new administration improvements

Capacity Planning

DB functionality is dependant on computational resources such as: CPUT, Memory, storage space, IO operations, etc. Investment Planning in HW requires answering questions such as: what is the current use?, how much time do I have left before it runs out?, how much do I need if the load increases by a given factor.

Our services allow us to answer this questions on a regular basis, making the right decisions with the required anticipation.

Growth Control

BD´s sustained growth progressivly deteriorates application performance, specially badly tuned ones. In addition, tasks such as backup, cloning and recovery are becoming more and more difficult. ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) techniques solve these problems in a simple and permanent way.

We have created methodologies for the development of ILM projects based on partitioning techniques, analysis of partitioning criteria, partitioning by reference, automation elimination and creation of new partitions, global index maintenance , online redefinition implementation.

An ILM project allows for operational data bases with stable sizes, which results in the stability of the used space, performance an administrative labors.

Stabilization and Performance Improvement

A high percentage of the applications response time is the responsibility of the data base. Multiple factors also play a role: availability and capacity of HW resources, configuration and parameterization of SW, containment by concurrency, efficiency of execution plans for SQL statements and how applications make use of the DB.

We use methodologies that allow us to determine which of these factors plays a role in specific problems as well as simultaneously improving them, achieving solutions in different levels at the same time.

Among the techniques used are:

• Depletion Detection of HW resources

• Analysis of waiting events

• Inefficient SQL detection

• Processes in inefficient applications (for example: excessive blocking, excessive update or commit, recurring statements, etc.)

These diagnoses are translated into recommentadions:

• HW Improvement

• Changes in configuration or parametrization of SW

• Changes in statistical update policies

• SQL sentence tuning: this can be implemented as changes in the application or by using stable plans in the DB

• Recommendation of application changes.

High Availability, Disaster Recovery and Scalability.

A robust Platform with capabilities that can adapt to the changing needs of the organization requires tolerance to HW component faults, site failures, human errors and HW scalability at the same time.

Maximum availability architecture is the integral solution to this needs. It çconsists in the complementation of the following technologies:

• Oracle RAc, is the clustered implementation of Databases that has both fault tolerance and HW power scaling

• Dataguard: Allows replication of Databases to contingency sites providing a solution to site failures.

• Flashback Database allows to access and restore partial or total content of a DB, thus being able to overcome human or process failures.

Maximizing Investment Return

Data bases offer a series of characteristics that can be of great utility.

• Automatic Storage Management (ASM): is the administrator storage provided by Oracle, which provides: LUN balancing, addition and replacement of online LUNs, active / active cluster support, redundancy management.

• Active Dataguard: To the classic Database implementation through Dataguard we add a report capability while the standby DB is kept updated.

• Flashback Database: allows the recovery or consultation of previous states of the DB, either partial or total. To this end, recovery scenarios of past states are defined.

• Snapshot Database: Allows for instant photographs of the DB state, and return to them or clone them if required,

• Moltitenant Database: Facilitates the centralization of DB by controlling what is shared and what is not.

• Grid Database: With a common infrastructure it allows to provide services to multiple applications and systems. The infrastructure inherits all the availability, scalability and management capabilities, allowing the shared use of common HW resources. In this way it is possible to assign more resources to an application by previously defined rules when required.

• GoldenGate: It allows the implementation Oracle and non Oracle DB replication, with complex business rules and different characteristics such as online capture, source encription in transaction files, etc..

Security and Regulation Compliance

With more and more frequency, organizations are requiring special attention to information security. This requires secure environments, either to protect their own data or the clients, and to comply with increasingly demanding internal and industry regulations.

Secure environment maintenance requires the concurrence of different elements that contribute to protect information on different fronts:

• Transparent Database Encryption: Maintains physical encryption on storage mediums.

• Network Data Encription: allows encripted network traffic.

• Database Vault: protects access to personal administrative date.

• Data Redaction: controls or limits access to sensible information.

• Data Masking: allows the preparation of test environments from the productive DB's without exposing sensible information from less protected environments such as QA or development.

• Audit Vault: centralization and custody of audit registers from different sources.

Normally, DB's platform securing involves the implementation of several of this technologies.