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Database Services

The modern enterprise becomes ever more data centric. In this environment, the health and well being of the software hosting the enterprise’s data takes higher and higher priority within the organization. Senior management in most global enterprises recognizes this and strives to mitigate their exposure to risk. With the increased criticality of the organization’s information, any loss of that data — whether through loss of availability, loss of integrity or loss of performance — looms as unacceptably costly.

With the proliferation of e-business, an enterprise today operates in an extremely complex and a highly networked, global economy and is more susceptible to interruptions than in the past. The cost of interruptions or downtime varies across industries and can be as much as millions of dollars an hour. While that number is staggering, the reasons are quite obvious. The Internet brings millions of customers directly to the electronic storefronts. Critical and interdependent business matters such as customers’ relationships, competitive advantages, legal obligations, industry reputation and shareholder confidence are even more critical now because of their increased vulnerability to business disruptions and downtimes.

Downtime that affects a business could be either unplanned or planned. Unplanned downtime may be due to hardware or system failures, data/storage failures, human errors, computer viruses, software glitches, natural disasters and/or malicious acts. Additionally, a business may undergo periodic planned downtimes because of scheduled maintenances such as system upgrades.

A company designing its database strategy must create an approach with sufficient robustness and flexibility to be capable of adapting to the ever changing business surroundings of the modern globally interconnected environment. Key to that strategy is the following elements:

• Enterprise Architecture & Design
• Database Upgrades & Migrations
• Production Support
• DSS Support
• Security Services
• Performance Tuning

 

By addressing each of these areas, an organization will move from a potentially risky and precarious position to a vantage point from which their vision can be implemented, secure in the knowledge that their information will always be safe, secure and available.

Enterprise Architecture & Design

“A requirements defect that is left undetected until construction or maintenance will cost 50 to 200 times as much to fix as it would have cost to fix at requirements time.” — Steve McConnel (1996)

At Guident, we believe that a well crafted architecture pays for itself many times over. The benefits of an elegant, clean design shine through at every stage of the software lifecycle:

• Developers write better code because the “big picture” is understood by all and the interaction between the various modules is clearly delineated
• Testers create better test cases, as they possess a better understanding of the client’s desires and thusly ensure correct delivery of the business requirements
• Administrators maintain the system more in line with the overall concept, tuning and manipulating the system(s) to achieve the clearly communicated solution

 

Guident’s architectural services include:

• Review of existing systems for performance and completeness
• Design of new systems in accordance to new or changing business requirements
• Refactoring an existing system to match new circumstances

 

Guident acts as a thought leader with regards to architectural solutions on Oracle databases. Past projects include real time operational data stores, very high throughput/highly available middleware messaging solutions and geographically distributed failover sites spanning multiple versions and heterogeneous platforms. While we are more than capable of performing all levels of design, a significant percentage of our clients look to Guident to fashion the intricate, complex and tricky solutions.

Database Upgrade & Migration

In any enterprise system, the time will come when the current system no longer performs in an acceptable manner. When this occurs, Guident will take the lead in assisting your organization in moving to a more appropriate solution.

Typically, this sort of project will take one of three forms:

1) Upgrading the existing system to the latest version of the same RDBMS software

2) Migrating the existing system to a new hardware platform

3) Porting the existing system to a new RDBMS from a different vendor

Each of these tasks increases in complexity as the project rises through the above list, but they all share similar processes and procedures. Guident has performed countless upgrades, migrations and porting operations throughout the history of the company and has largely perfected the process to a minimally invasive, turnkey operation.

Production Support

Guident does not believe our work is complete once a system has been deployed into the enterprise. Maintaining the system in pristine condition is equally important as creating it. The challenges associated with successfully sustaining an operational system can prove interesting from time to time, but Guident’s long experience with highly available (24x7) production systems has produced a rigorous group of practices and procedures that work to ensure quiet, orderly and uneventful environments.

Production support can take many forms. Depending on the business needs of your organization, Guident can provide:

• Backup and recovery strategies to guarantee that the data contained with the operational environment would be able to survive a disaster
• Extensive monitoring to comply with any SLA and prevent a disaster from occurring
• Onsite resources and/or remote administration to manage the system on any desired basis, up to and including continuous (24x7x365)
• Capacity planning to ensure the existing database solution will be able to process the expected amount of data both now and into the future

 

Decision Support Systems

One definition of a Decision Support Systems (DSS) is “A Decision Support System (DSS) is an interactive computer-based system or subsystem intended to help decision makers use communications technologies, data, documents, knowledge and/or models to identify and solve problems, complete decision process tasks, and make decisions.” Common deployments of DSS will include data warehouses, OLAP cubes and Business Intelligence reporting tools.

Guident is a thought leader in the Business Intelligence field and has extensive experience with supporting DSS systems. A DSS database is quite unlike a transactional database, and special care must be paid to ensure smooth and proper operation of such an environment. Some examples of what Guident can provide to a client with DSS include:

• Performance Tuning — The performance characteristics of a DSS system behaves radically differently than a transactional system, both within the instance and the operational SQL
• Production Support — Working with VLDB (Very Large DataBases) requires a new direction in backup and recovery, data health and corruption monitoring and space management

 

Security Services

Security has always been important. In today’s operational environment, compliance and verification of database has become essential — particularly in light of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX). Guident has extensive experience in full SOX compliance, as well as supporting classified environments. Working within the Oracle framework, your organization’s data remains in the hands of only the duly authorized users. Through integration with existing LDAP structures (ex. Microsoft ADS, IBM Tivoli), your databases integrated into the environment seamlessly. The operational environment supports multiple levels of security — from token and biometric authentication through single sign on. Complete SOX and PCI compliance can be achieved via Oracle Vault, with Label Security to support US Government classification requirements.

Performance Tuning

The typical time most organizations review an Oracle database for tuning improvements is when some concern about performance arises from within the instance. We at Guident believe in proactively searching for bottlenecks and other efficiency traps prior to their impact inducing the concern. In our experience, the overall environment is more stable and responsive to business needs when small, discrete improvements are discovered continuously rather than an occasional massive effort to change as much as possible at one time. The largest issue with tuning an Oracle database revolves around the sheer complexity of the endeavor. The very expansiveness of Oracle induces decision paralysis from time to time. Fortunately, Guident has long experience with all variants of tuning an Oracle environment including:

• Instance tuning — This involves manipulating the parameters of the instance to maximize resources
• SQL tuning — Individual SQL statements can induce significant problems within an instance. Guident’s method is to identify problematic SQL and work with developers to improve the statements as quickly as possible
• Application tuning — Apart from SQL tuning, the overall logic of the application as well as more generalized aspects of the code will be examined for potential increases in processing (the manner in which the application connects to the database, for example)
• Architectural tuning — All of the objects may need adjustments to achieve the most optimal performance
• Platform tuning — Outside of the database, both the hardware and the operating system may be explored for additional gains
• Network tuning — The infrastructure connecting the database server to the calling application may also hold some hidden efficiencies

 

Why Guident?

Guident’s experience with performance in a variety of customer deployments with varying technical and business requirements enables our consultants to deliver:

• A professional performance tuning experience based on proven industry experiences
• A low risk and rapid implementation using previously tried and tested methods and tools
• Access to highly accomplished professionals for skills transfer into your own technical teams

 

In addition to industry proven consultants with extensive experience, Guident capitalizes on the strength and maturity of the product sets and tools specific to each engagement including:

• Platform specific prerequisites
• An tuning implementation plan and task list
• Early adoption of tuning requirements and best practices

 

Key implementation principles

 

• Quick Time to Deliver — Guident provides clients a “Quick Win” (usually 90-120 days per phase) so users quickly realize benefits, while applying lessons learned in future phases
• User Involvement — Guident engages the user community from the get- go and presents an analytical solution they can “touch and see” early in the development lifecycle
• Allow Evolving Requirements — Business users can identify many requirements, but once they realize the capabilities of the software tool, they may quickly think of additional functionality and data requirements