5 Database Lifecycle Management Capabilities Every DBA Must Have

As a DBA, managing your company’s valuable data is a primary concern which you must balance with your day-to-day responsibilities. This includes continuous installation, configuration, migration, and updates to the database. Ultimately, any problems that arise with the database fall onto your shoulders – along with the responsibility to mitigate risks and implement fixes as quickly as possible. With constant pressure for technology companies to release frequent updates to applications, overcoming common challenges in database lifecycle management is a daily concern.

Here are five databases lifecycle management capabilities, which offer highly efficient ways to manage the database schema, data, and metadata for a database application. By implementing these solutions, you will spend less time retracing steps or wasting time tracking down information and documentation, which are unnecessary and expensive.

1. Effective Risk Mitigation

A three-way analysis mechanism highlights database conflicts, enabling you to detect and respond to requested changes and to protect corporate information. This analysis provides a valuable alternative to damage control, comparing objects between environments and generating the proper commands to reflect the change. A three-way, Baseline-Aware Analysis, goes beyond the capabilities of standard compare-and-sync tools to identify not only that configuration drift exists, but where the changes originate and whether changes are safe to deploy, mitigating one of the most prominent risks faced by DBA Managers attempting to implement continuous delivery for the database. This enables you to save a snapshot of the database schemas and lookup content before and after successfully rolling out any version. These snapshots can be used as a Golden copy and act as a baseline when generating the next release’s database build script.

2. Business Agility Made Possible with a Deployment Manager Wizard

A DBA should automatically generate the build script (deploy, promote, or upgrade script) based on change request (CR) or business requirements. This enables anyone to generate the database build script with a few mouse clicks and select the objects being analyzed based on several different criteria, such as: application versions, labels, object type, object name, CR, related to business requirement requests, and so on.

By creating the database build script, you can drastically reduce the preparation phase in the release cycle and ship out rapid changes to satisfy the ever-increasing demands for leaner, more agile development cycles, providing true business agility often sought after but rarely achievable when it comes to database development due to the challenges faced with continuous delivery for the database. The preparation phase should be reduced from days and weeks to just minutes and hours.

3. Improve Development Collaboration and Gain a Complete Audit Trail History

An efficient check-in, check-out process prevents any team member from making changes to database objects or content without first checking the item out. The check-out process locks the object for access by other team members, preventing two development teams from making simultaneous changes to the same objects. Development collaboration is drastically improved by avoiding out-of-process changes that create conflicts and issues later in the development lifecycle. When an object is checked in, the developer is prompted to enter the reason for the change, with everything else automatically documented, including who made the change, where, and when – creating a complete audit trail to improve compliance and governance.

4. Support for Policy-Based Database Development and Deployment

One of the major challenges for DBA managers is to differentiate roles and responsibilities when it comes to the database. DBA teams can’t deal with code review, but are left to deal with damage control when things break. The right support regarding change policy enforcement also enables you to harness your Active Directory policies and impose them on the databases in every environment. For example, you can give developers full access in the development environment and a read credential in the testing environment (if required for debugging purposes), but restrict them from the structure and lookup content changes in the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and the production environments.

5. Automation and Collaboration

Boost overall developers and DBAs productivity by 20% through automated processes and collaboration functionality. Also, it helps create a competitive advantage and a shorter time-to-market while reducing time for managing changes.