A Key Trend In Our World of Databases

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A Key Trend In Our World of Databases
There are things happening that go a long way toward providing some insight into the future for DBAs and database professionals. I think they split along a couple of different forks from what we’re seeing and hearing at this point. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this – tell me if I’m off base or if you’re beginning to see similar things.

First, I think there are wide swaths of applications that are actively coming onto the scene and gaining acceptance that will have to be supported, managed and maintained. SharePoint is the easiest of these to point to – nearly every installation I know of at this point is considering it, moving toward it or otherwise in the throws of figuring out how to work with SharePoint and get the most out of it. This is both great news and worrisome. Worrisome because there are so many pieces of SharePoint that hide from the SP administrators – database management is one of those. There is a real need for working with these application suites and working with the tools that they use, understanding what can be tweaked, what needs to be left alone and what planning needs to be done. We’ll be covering increasing information about SharePoint and supporting it – more on this later.

In the meantime, some interesting planning points for SharePoint systems. First, from an unofficial SharePoint admin survey I’ve just completed, most of those responsible for the administration of the systems supporting SharePoint are convinced that the systems are self-managing and don’t require a DBA "until the system gets much larger." While the system can install and get going effectively, I think there is great opportunity for tuning, management and planning by working together to put best practices in place.

Second, disk space alone often doubles year-over-year. This is huge and might not be planned for without some specific guidance, logging of utilization and such. Knowing to set up the baselines and then projecting the usage patterns out into the future, with modifications and updates on regular intervals, is huge. Get involved, help out, show what’s needed in terms of monitoring, planning and management.

The other "fork" that is becoming very evident is that of data analysis. This means different thing to different people, but it spans understanding what information is on your systems, how it’s used and how it could be used. So, if reporting is your thing, this means understanding the data elements and how they apply to your work/business. If design is your thing, understanding the schemas, relationships and design goals (what information is needed, how, and how will it be retrieved) are desperately needing to be understood. These areas, and more that we’ll talk about more this week, are *critical* in supporting your systems and giving your company or clients incredible value for your work.

What do you think – what do you see as the direction – your direction – looking out to the horizon?

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