Today’s businesses run on data, making it essential for them to access data quickly and easily. This requirement means that databases must run efficiently at all times but keeping a database performing at its best remains a challenging task. Fortunately, database administrators (DBAs) can adopt many practices to achieve this goal, thus saving time and money.

1. © 2019 IDERA, Inc. All rights reserved.
© 2022 Idera, Inc. All rights reserved.
OPTIMIZE THE PERFORMANCE,
COST, AND VALUE OF DATABASES
Today’s businesses run on data, making it essential for them to access data quickly
and easily. This requirement means that databases must run efficiently at all times
but keeping a database performing at its best remains a challenging task.
Fortunately, database administrators (DBAs) can adopt many practices to achieve
this goal, thus saving time and money.

2. © 2019 IDERA, Inc. All rights reserved.
© 2022 Idera, Inc. All rights reserved.
KEY FACTORS TO OPTIMIZATION
Organizations need to access data fast
Keep databases running smoothly at all times
Keeping databases healthy remains challenging
Database administrators ensure database performance

3. © 2019 IDERA, Inc. All rights reserved.
© 2022 Idera, Inc. All rights reserved.
DATABASE AUDITS
Databases lose
performance without
proper maintenance
Designs no longer
meet current needs
Audit regularly with
schema evaluations
Review logs for functional activities (table views, updates, deletions)
Review database accounts so that users have minimum rights

4. © 2019 IDERA, Inc. All rights reserved.
© 2022 Idera, Inc. All rights reserved.
MONITOR VIRTUAL MACHINES
• Transitioning from on-premises to cloud-based is
challenging
• Databases are resource-intensive applications
• Performance can be poor on virtual versus physical
machines
• Use monitoring tools to monitor virtual machines,
databases, and queries

5. © 2019 IDERA, Inc. All rights reserved.
© 2022 Idera, Inc. All rights reserved.
DELETE UNNECESSARY DATA
● Delete old data that is no longer needed to improve performance
● Otherwise old data returns irrelevant results
● Rather than deleting old rows, move current rows into new table
● Later, drop old tables with old rows
AUTOMATE ADMINISTRATIVE TASKS
● DBAs already have tools to automate many of their tasks, but
DBAs need to always maximize automation
● Ensure that automation saves time in long run
● Only automate tasks that do not involve lots of manual data entry

6. © 2019 IDERA, Inc. All rights reserved.
© 2022 Idera, Inc. All rights reserved.
OPTIMIZE SQL QUERIES
Poorly structured queries cause
sluggish database performance
Narrow result set to minimum needed
to reduce execution times
Change queries to reduce
deadlocking to improving performance
Deadlocking prevents queries from
obtaining needed resources
SCHEDULE LONG SQL QUERIES
Query execution times can be
prohibitive even after optimization
Need to schedule long-running
queries that are not time-sensitive
Schedule queries to run during low
demand on database resources
Run queries outside of business
hours

7. © 2019 IDERA, Inc. All rights reserved.
MANAGE DATABASE GROWTH
DBAs must routinely manage the growth of their databases to prevent applications
from failing simply because a database ran out of space. Setting a database’s
maximum size to a particular value is an easy way to prevent this occurrence, but
it also means that users will get an error when they try to add more rows to a table.
DBAs should carefully review a database before setting a maximum size limit to
ensure this action is the appropriate solution. It’s usually better to allow a database
to grow automatically provided storage capacity isn’t an issue.
© 2022 Idera, Inc. All rights reserved.