SBR webinar tackles challenges in database management

An audience of senior IT professionals took part in the exclusive webinar, supported by Quest Software.

Businesses are continuously changing to remain competitive. As more firms transition to digital platforms, database management is set to become a key differentiator for organisations, according to speakers at Much ado about data: Managing multiple databases with better efficiency webinar. This was hosted by Singapore Business Review, in partnership with Quest Software on 13 August.

Companies are focusing now more than ever on getting their technology better. Whilst vast amounts of data are now available to every business, capturing, managing, and analysing all of that information can be a significant challenge.

To level up their database management performances, senior leaders from the IT, and communications professions participated in the webinar, and heard from both Quest Software's Principal Technologist, Hollis Valencia and NCS' Director, Business Application Services, Srirengan Kumar on the evolving challenges of database management today.

Singapore Business Review’s Chief Editor Tim Charlton moderated the event.

Accelerating the digital transformation process

The pandemic is said to have sped up the digitisation process for multiple companies in different industries. It has affected day-to-day work both within organizations up to end-customers, making services more accessible through the internet.

“Because of this, there is a rise in multiple systems and additional pressure on new technologies and architectures we are practising,” said Kumar.

As businesses transform to use multiple databases, Kumar highlights the need to understand the changes happening in digitalization and business transformation, as well as the key issues needed to be addressed. These would include managing multiple systems and how can organisations streamline their way in managing these.

Kumar said that companies need to introduce efficiency in their operations. “We can’t continuously increase manpower which will increase cost without the necessary resources. We need to move towards efficient operations,” he added.

Companies need to be proactive in resolving database problems despite their complicated architecture, as well as addressing the overall governance issues for faster turnaround.

“One of the key areas that we need to look at is data governance before you even start in data management. These are the ones that set the verification back to the base line and make sure that we are adhering to compliances,” Kumar said.

“We need to have policies in place and how efficiently are we going to manage the multiple databases using the policies and procedures that we have and by incorporating tools as part of our work.” These tools can also be used to ensure that the data quality would adhere to established metrics based on the right metadata management processes and proper data standardization.

Managing multiple databases in a hybrid environment

For companies to gain complete visibility on the health and performance of its database environment, they would need the right tools in managing their multi-platform databases. Valencia notes that Quest Software's Foglight is one of these tools which can help companies identify inefficiencies and guide them to deliver a step-by-step action plan for maximizing database performance.

Foglight for multi-platform databases is said to provide a single pane of glass globalview of all database platforms, along with performance indicators such as workloads, alarms, system utilizations. The software diagnoses performance issues using multi-dimensional analysis and provides alerts to identify the root cause of problems.

“It allows you to drill down on the underlying component to see what objects and factors are contributing to the overall workload,” said Valencia.

Quest’s database management solution also provides companies with the tools that simplify complexity, reduce costs and risks, as well as drive performance. It also helps to correlate if a certain change has a significant impact on the database workload

“Foglight for databases will help your team to proactively monitor and diagnose performance issues in a heterogeneous multi-database platform, ensuring your business applications are running efficiently 24/7,” added Valencia.
 

Much ado about data: Managing multiple databases with better efficiency from Charlton Media Group on Vimeo.