Case Study: Database Assessment For Global Nonprofit Organization

Problem

Prior to engaging with a global nonprofit organization dedicated to helping underprivileged children thrive through every stage of their lives employed one full-time DBA who managed the organizations SQL Server and Oracle environments. Having only one DBA to support the entire environment not only meant he was stretched very thin, but it also meant the databases were unsupported if the DBA was unavailable for any reason. As a result, database performance tuning and optimizations were often unable to be addressed.  Having only one DBA is always considered to be a major risk for the business.  Solvaria provided a team of both senior level Oracle and SQL DBA’s to add team depth, eliminate the single point of failure and offer strategy and process for projects, upgrades and data migrations.

Solution

Although the organization has existed since 1938, technology was becoming more and more important to them as their databases were mission critical for maintaining children’s and donors’ data all over the world. For this reason, Solvaria’s team of senior DBAs determined a deep dive database assessment was essential in order to uncover threats and vulnerabilities that could impact the business. This assessment included reviewing the current physical database implementation, monitoring relevant performance metrics, and identifying key issues impacting that performance. Once these issues were uncovered, our team would then have the information needed to develop a long-lasting database strategy that could support the organization for future growth and changes in technology.

Results

After a period of monitoring, gathering statistics on performance and gathering queries, our DBAs not only uncovered performance issues impacting the end users and the business, but also security threats that potentially be detrimental for the organization.  We immediately set out to make improvements on the health of the databases, making it our priority to address the issues having the biggest impact the business. In this case, it was backups and performance.

Following remediation of performance and security issues, our next priority was to eliminate the single point of failure and provide senior Solvaria DBAs to support the databases. Our Oracle and SQL Server DBAs worked as a part of the organization’s team to address monitoring and maintenance 24 hours a day. We helped to configure and set up alerts and monitors to help us be proactive in our support.  The team approach ensures that all alerts are being answered, performance issues are being addressed, all while implementing a strategy to set the organization up for continuous growth in the future. Today, our team of six DBAs has been successfully maintaining all aspects of their databases for more than five years, proving our assessment findings and strategy implementation successful.

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