Understanding best practices for database compliance audits

Whether or not you have a good grasp of your license standing and are confident your database licenses are compliant, an audit is still a grueling process to go through. Most database licenses have a formal license agreement and process that allows reasonable audits of usage and compliance, so it’s important to stay ahead if you don’t want a bad audit experience.

To help guide our clients through any compliance request and ensure a less painful audit, Solvaria follows these best practices:

  • Provide the information requested – and nothing more
  • Keep track of all correspondence and review all requests and responses carefully
  • Know what’s going to requested
    Items typically requested in an audit include: listing of the products and licenses your organization is using, the hardware platforms and configurations (CPU type/size especially) in use for those products, output from various OS and/or database scripts, and running of certain processes or procedures. For a more comprehensive list, download our whitepaper via the pop-up form.
  • Be aware of how to handle being out of compliance
    Database representatives will work with you to determine additional licenses required and/or other options for resolution.
  • Follow industry best practices to keep your licenses compliant before being audited
    These include cleaning up named user or CPU license surplus or deficits, reconciling minimum license requirements, purchase of any additional required licenses, etc.  To be safe – audit yourself before anyone else does!

If your organization has received a database audit request and you’re not sure where your licenses stand, Solvaria can provide answers.

If your organization runs Oracle, our Oracle Practice Team Lead has created a whitepaper to download as a cheatsheet to Oracle Licensing audits. Or, reach out to one of our expert DBAs for more information via the form below.

Additional Information

Screen Shot 2023 01 18 at 9.27.18 AM copy

Technologies Supported

AWS
Azure
Azure Data warehouse
Cognos
IDERA
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
MySQL
NoSQL
Oracle
Oracle Cloud
PowerBI
Python
Qlikview
R
RedGate
Snowflake
SolarWinds
Sql Sentry
SQL Server
SSAS
Sybase
Tableau
    quote icon

    We’re a small company that doesn’t always need a full time DBA in house, but our highly complex platform with critical performance and availability SLAs requires an experienced 24×7 DBA readily available. Solvaria is great to work with on everyday tasks as well as complex projects, and it’s helpful to work with a DBA team and company that is local. The face-to-face team approach combined with the knowledgeable, experienced, and responsive people at Solvaria is hard to beat.

    Nathan, Product Optimization Company

    Before working with Solvaria, our company had poor database server performance and insufficient internal knowledge and skills to fix and maintain it. The Solvaria team brings the skills and knowledge we need, but lots of companies could do that. Their highly-responsive, customer-centric approach sets them apart from other data services organizations and they make me feel appreciated as a client. We get everything that we would need from a full-time DBA at a fraction of the cost.

    VP of North American Operations, Energy Forecasting Company

    Our company had grown to the point where we needed a more professional database administration team. We had tried hiring DBAs but there was not enough consistent work to warrant having a full-time employee. When I approached my executive team with the cost estimates for replacing our previous DBA vendor with Solvaria, it was a no brainer. We were essentially getting three resources for less than what we were paying for just one from the previous vendor. And all three Solvaria resources have played an active role in our company’s growth with database technologies.

    Andy, Retail Strategy Company

    Our main issue was that we were consistently running into smaller problems that ended up having larger impacts. Our DBA team at the time was not up to speed on the latest database technologies and was not proactive in recommending certain changes. Solvaria jumped right in and made a point to become part of our company, not just an outsourced vendor. They quickly brought our systems up to speed and put the monitoring in place we needed.

    Andy, Retail Strategy Company

    A key difference between Solvaria and other database vendors is availability. It is reassuring that if I have a deployment or upgrade and I reach out to the team and ask if anyone is available, I always get back a friendly response that Solvaria is ready when we need them.

    Andy, Retail Strategy Company