Being a DBA is not a 9-5 job, 5 days-a-week. You can't switch off when you leave the office, but unfortunately you do disconnect from your work place. In today's inter-connected world, it is possible to work from anywhere, but often the tools, the systems and the environment you need are all there ready and waiting - in your office!

For example, in my office, I have one laptop that is my main machine and it is docked/undocked every working day into a multi-monitor setup, but I also have a separate PC that I use to run all my monitoring tools, system checks, and general system management tasks. That's 3 screens, all giving me data, all day long. It's like driving a car, a quick glance up to the rear-view mirror and I can see what’s going on behind without really taking focus off what’s coming up ahead - similarly at work, a quick glance over to the monitoring workstation to see if all the alerts are green and all the graphs are steady. When I need to work away from the office, the laptop is perfectly capable of running everything it needs to, but I haven't got that multi-screen view. Even working from home - I haven't physically got enough hardware to replicate the perfect environment, and inevitably the one thing that gets left behind is the monitoring view! To have the ability to monitor the servers on a screen large enough to be able to catch your attention, whilst at the same time be physically small and light enough to be portable would be a dream. Not only that but the screen is also interactive - need to delve into that alert a bit more - no need for a mouse or keyboard, just pick it up and go. Now you can be as productive away from the office as you are in the office, especially when it comes to proactive monitoring.

And that’s not where the benefits stop - now that level of monitoring goes everywhere you go. We often have our centralized monitoring solutions, but that's only useful when you are sat on top of it, watching it. The way to extend that was to have emails and paging alerts fly out of the system, grabbing the attention of some poor soul on an on-call rota who would investigate the alert and then escalate it. So whether you are simply in a meeting down the corridor, or in another country - you can still keep an eye on your servers.

Finally, if you are in an IT meeting, and the question of server performance comes up - there's no need to go away and produce some stats and graphs, just jump straight into the analysis page and show everyone what you mean - even use the 'rewind time' feature to demonstrate what was going on at 2am, four nights ago - your colleagues and management will be impressed that you have such a good handle on your databases.