The ability to manage databases and the information stored in them can, quite literally, be the difference between life and death. At hospitals, everything from lab results and X-rays, to full medical records, are stored in databases. A crashed database carries serious consequences for patient care.

The consequences of unhealthy databases are severe anywhere information is gold. At the bank, all financial records and transactions are stored on a database. At a clothing shop, everything from store inventory to point-of-sale information is all housed similarly.

The well-being of patients and businesses relies on healthy databases. Maintaining increasingly complex databases, fixing problems day or night, and keeping pace with the latest technology is straining the hodgepodge system of in-house database administrators and on-site consultants employed by most companies.

The time has come for a new way of maintaining databases, one that brings the mountain to Mohammed. A new generation of database administration vendors is harnessing the power of the Internet in ways not possible 10 years ago. Remote database administration is the future of database maintenance. When you can't bring the DBA to your database, bring the database to your remote DBA.

Growing Amounts of Data

The amount of data being stored in databases is growing at an astronomical rate each year. The global economy requires this information be available seven days a week, 24 hours a day. Traditionally, companies hire database administrators who are a specialized resource with one critical job.

However, database administrators are hard to find, hard to retain, and even harder to keep up to speed with the constantly changing technology landscape. This problem has forced companies to seek outside help.

Historically, companies looking for outside assistance would hire a consultant to come in on a time and material basis, to fill these critical needs. The consultants hired in this manner come to the physical work site to perform all services rendered. Anyone who has ever done this knows first hand it's an expensive way to solve the problem. It’s even more expensive when the high-priced expert is asked to work off-hours, even though working off-hours is often a requirement of the job of DBA.

In many parts of the United States, there is a shortage of DBA consultants. In markets like New York and San Francisco, there are just not enough database administrators to go around. Bigger companies are competing with smaller companies for this same critical resource. And smaller companies are at a severe disadvantage in their ability to compete.

The combination of bigger and bigger databases, more and more complex technology, and the shortage of database administrators, combined with the difficulty in training and retaining DBAs, has created a critical need in the marketplace that traditional consulting is unable to meet.

To fill this critical gap, a new generation of database administration vendors has emerged. These new vendors use the Internet to make high-end database administration resources available remotely whenever and wherever they are needed.

Over the past few years, the many demands of the marketplace have changed the way we do traditional application development. It is now common practice for many companies to out-task or off-shore traditional application development, bringing the work to teams of developers located in different parts of the world. As the practice of application development outsourcing becomes more and more acceptable, it is only natural for the idea to migrate to different portions of the information technology stack.

Enlisting remote DBAs to manage databases is an idea whose time has come. There are a number of companies that offer teams of remote database administrators, armed with an arsenal of specialized tools, located all over the globe, able to manage databases from those locations in a cost-effective and a pro-active manner.
It's time to bring the database to the DBA.

About the Author

Michael Corey, founder and CEO of Ntirety, a company that specializes in remote database administration, is an original Oracle Press author, a past president of the Independent Oracle Users Group and helped found the Professional Association of SQL Server. Corey is a member of the Massachusetts Robert H. Goddard Council for STEM. Check out his blog on RDBA at http://michaelcorey.ntirety.com.