I watched a video recently by Forester Research  , discussing Database Cost Savings. The video was intended for IT decision makers, Senior DBAs and systems managers. There were some interesting points  but all require careful analysis before implementation

The main message was : the current economic environment requires rethinking of database costs. The traditional methods of consolidations, migration and upgrades are not keeping costs down .

The main trends in database management are  :

1)  Data Volumes are growing . In some environments data is doubling every few months.

2)   Large databases – analyse  the impact on : performance , backups, availability.  Multi-terabyte databases are normal.

3)  New business requirements – compliance, real time

4)  IT budgets are under pressure to decrease

5)  Improved SLAs – user are increasing on a 24 x 7 basis

 New Approaches

1)  Virtualized infrastructure – Within the virtualized infrastructure there are two approaches:

a)  multiple VMs on a host server

b)  Clustering multiple servers for virtualized environments

Virtualizing database servers has many benefits – but extracting the performance from IO and CPU intensive servers is a challenge.

Read Database Virtual Server Candidacy Criteria

Read Virtualization – and database servers

2)  Database compatibility layers (DCL)

“database access layer that supports another database management system's (DBMS's) proprietary extensions natively, allowing existing applications to access the new database transparently”  This is a new feature of DB2 9.7

Ability to run an applications against another DBMS natively

The main benefit is it requires minimal changes

3) Database as a service

Delivers a database readily on demand to support any application. The licensing models are based on use.  It allows capacity on demand.

4)  Database compression

It’s not new , but now based on row\page . Hard disk space is saved and query performance can increase.  Weigh up against increased CPU.

 Read Data compression in SQL Server 2008

 5)  Database sub setting

Database sub setting is a method of creating referentially accurate, stripped down versions of a Production database.  This version is used in Development or Test environments

6) Automation administration

Tuning , backups , security

Read SQL Server DBA Top 10 automation tasks

Other traditional options are:

1)  Database and server consolidation

2)  Open source databases

3)  Data archiving

4)   Managed services and outsourcing

Author: Jack Vamvas (http://www.sqlserver-dba.com)