It's always the databases' fault!

We all have them lurking around in our data centers.  Some virtual, some physical.  Some small, some large.  At times we find them consolidated onto one server, other times we see many of them scattered across multiple servers.  There’s no getting away from it – I’m talking about the database.  Whether its’ relational or somewhat flattened the database is perhaps one of the oldest and most misunderstood technologies that we find inside businesses IT infrastructure today.  When applications slow down, it’s usually the database in which the fingers get pointed at – and we as IT professionals need to know how to pin point and solve issues inside these mystical structures of data, as missing just a few transactions could potentially result in a lot of loss revenue for our company.

I work for an SMB, where we don’t have teams of specialists or DBA’s to look after these things.  This normally results in my time and effort focusing on being proactive by automating things such as index rebuilds and database defragmentation.  That said we still experience issues and when we do seeing as I have a million other things to take care of I don’t have the luxury of taking my time when troubleshooting database issues.  So my questions for everyone on first week of partaking as a thwack ambassador are.

1. Which database application is mostly used within your environment (SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, DB2, etc)?
2. Do you have a team and/or a person dedicated solely as a DBA, monitoring performance and analyzing databases?  Or is this left to the infrastructure teams to take care of?
3. What applications/tools/scripts do you use to monitor your database performance and overall health?
4. What types of automation and orchestration do you put in place to be proactive in tuning your databases (things such as re-indexing, re-organizing, defragmentation, etc).  And how do you know when the right time is to kick these off?

Thanks for your replies and I can’t wait to see what answers come in.

Related resources:

Article: Hardware or code? SQL Server Performance Examined — Most database performance issues result not from hardware constraint, but rather from poorly written queries and inefficiently designed indexes. In this article, database experts share their thoughts on the true cause of most database performance issues.

Whitepaper: Stop Throwing Hardware at SQL Server Performance — In this paper, Microsoft MVP Jason Strate and colleagues from Pragmatic Works discuss some ways to identify and improve performance problems without adding new CPUs, memory or storage.

Infographic: 8 Tips for Faster SQL Server Performance — Learn 8 things you can do to speed SQL Server performance without provisioning new hardware.