Just started a new series on bad standards over on my Data Management Today blog.
Check it out when you get a chance and share your favorite "bad standards" either here or there... or by e-mailing me.
News, views, and items of interest on IBM's Db2 database management system and mainframes.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Monday, October 20, 2008
DBA Rules of Thumb
Database administration is a very technical discipline, but it is also a discipline in which the practitioner is very visible politically within the organization. As such, DBAs should be armed with the proper attitude and knowledge before attempting to practice the discipline of database administration.
Just as important as technical acumen, though, is the ability to carry oneself properly and to embrace the job appropriately. With this in mind, I wrote a series of blog entries on DBA Rules of Thumb over at my Data Management Today blog... and I thought the information I wrote there may be helpful to my DB2 and mainframe readership here, so I'm sharing the eight rules of thumb (with links) here on my DB2 Portal blog:
P.S. Just a reminder that I will be presenting a webinar on assuring DB2 recoverability with my colleague, Michael Figaro, this Thursday, October 23, 2008 at 10:30 Central time. If you are at all interested in the topic, be sure to register today - and attend this Thursday!
Just as important as technical acumen, though, is the ability to carry oneself properly and to embrace the job appropriately. With this in mind, I wrote a series of blog entries on DBA Rules of Thumb over at my Data Management Today blog... and I thought the information I wrote there may be helpful to my DB2 and mainframe readership here, so I'm sharing the eight rules of thumb (with links) here on my DB2 Portal blog:
- Document Everything!
- Automate Ingelligently
- Share
- Don't Panic!
- Focus Your Efforts
- Invest In Yourself
- Diversify
- Develop Business Acumen
P.S. Just a reminder that I will be presenting a webinar on assuring DB2 recoverability with my colleague, Michael Figaro, this Thursday, October 23, 2008 at 10:30 Central time. If you are at all interested in the topic, be sure to register today - and attend this Thursday!
Thursday, October 09, 2008
Assuring the Recoverability of Your DB2 Databases
Availability requires much more than just having a reliable hardware and database platform. Most companies cannot afford significant downtime, and some cannot afford any! As such, it is crucial for unplanned outages to be as short as possible. But it is not just a business requirement, in many cases assuring a speedy recovery is also a legal mandate. Regulations such as SOX and Basel II dictate that any outage is resolved within a predefined period of time.
But how many of us can answer, with any degree of certainty, the question “How long will this outage last?” There are many variables that need to be considered when estimating a DB2 recovery time: backups available, quality, point-in-time requirements, amount of log processing, disk speed, tape mounts, and on and on and on...
With these thoughts in mind, Michael Figaro and I will be delivering a webinar titled Assuring the Recoverability of Your DB2 Databases, on Thursday, October 23, 2008 at 10:30 am CDT.
We will tackle issues ranging from regulations, IT complexity, and business continuity, to DSNZPARMs and backup/recovery planning. We’ll also make the case that planning for database recoverability is the most important task among the many tasks of the DBA.
As part of the webinar we will introduce and demonstrate Recovery AssuranceExpert, a new technology to help you ensure that all of your critical DB2 objects are recoverable within your recovery time objectives. Recovery AssuranceExpert is an automated solution to perform daily health checks of data availability and recoverability, as well as provide actual recovery times required for a DB2 object, a complete application, or even a whole DB2 subsystem. Join us on October 23rd to find out how you can insure that your actual recoverability times fit into your SLAs.
But how many of us can answer, with any degree of certainty, the question “How long will this outage last?” There are many variables that need to be considered when estimating a DB2 recovery time: backups available, quality, point-in-time requirements, amount of log processing, disk speed, tape mounts, and on and on and on...
With these thoughts in mind, Michael Figaro and I will be delivering a webinar titled Assuring the Recoverability of Your DB2 Databases, on Thursday, October 23, 2008 at 10:30 am CDT.
We will tackle issues ranging from regulations, IT complexity, and business continuity, to DSNZPARMs and backup/recovery planning. We’ll also make the case that planning for database recoverability is the most important task among the many tasks of the DBA.
As part of the webinar we will introduce and demonstrate Recovery AssuranceExpert, a new technology to help you ensure that all of your critical DB2 objects are recoverable within your recovery time objectives. Recovery AssuranceExpert is an automated solution to perform daily health checks of data availability and recoverability, as well as provide actual recovery times required for a DB2 object, a complete application, or even a whole DB2 subsystem. Join us on October 23rd to find out how you can insure that your actual recoverability times fit into your SLAs.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
A Perfect Storm?
There is something of a perfect storm brewing in the world of data today. The world is becoming more automated, more connected, more wireless, and more complex. The next wave of database administration is intelligent automation. I refer to this as implementing software scrubbing bubbles that “work hard, so you don’t have to.” (Remember that commercial!)
As more of the tasks required of DBAs become more automated, the DBA will be freed to expand into other areas. So one front on this storm is the autonomic computing initiatives that automate DBA tasks. At the same time, IT professionals are being asked to know more about the business instead of just knowing the technology. So DBAs need to understand the business purpose and definition of the data they manage, as well as the technological underpinnings of the DBMS. The driving force here is predominantly regulatory compliance. This second front of the perfect storm will cause DBAs to work more closely with metadata to drive database archiving, data auditing, and security to ensure their organization complies with regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, and others.
Regarding the wireless aspect of things, pervasive devices (PDA, handhelds, cell phones, etc.) will increasingly interact with database systems. DBAs will need to get involved there to ensure successful data synchronization. And database systems will work with disconnected data seamlessly, such as data generated by RFID tags.
Yet another big database trend is technology "suck." By that I mean the DBMS is as it sucks up technologies and functions that previously required you to purchase separate software. Remember when the DBMS had no ETL or OLAP functionality? Those days are gone. This will continue as the DBMS adds capabilities to tackle more and more IT tasks.
Another trend impacting DBAs will be a change in some of their roles as more and more of the recent DBMS features actually start being used in more production systems.
The net result of this perfect storm of changes is that data professionals are absolutely being required to do more... sometimes with less (less time, less money, less staff, etc.)
If you know the technology but are then required to know the business, this is doing more – much more. But the technology, in many cases, is also expanding. For example, DB2 9 incorporates native XML. Most DBAs are not XML savvy, but increasingly they will have to learn more about XML as the DBMS technology expands. And this is just one example.
Additionally, data is growing at an ever-increasing rate. Every year the amount of data under management increases (some analysts peg the compound annual rate of data growth at 125%) and in many cases the number of DBAs to manage that growing data is not increasing, and indeed, could be decreasing.
And, budgetary limitations can cause DBAs to have to do more work, to more data, with less resources. When a company reduces budget but demands more work, automation is an absolute necessity. Turning work over to the computer can help (although it is unlikely to solve every administrative issue). Sometimes IT professionals fight against the very thing they excel in – that is, automating work. If you think about it, every computer program is written to automate someone’s work – the write (word processing), the accountant (financials, payroll, spreadsheets), and so on. This automation did not put the executives whose work was automated out of a job; instead it made them more efficient. Yet, for some reason, there is a notion in the IT industry that automating IT tasks will eliminate jobs. You cannot automate a DBA out of existence – but you can make that DBA’s job more effective and efficient with DBA tools and autonomic computing.
And the sad truth of the matter is that there is still a LOT more than can, and should, be done in most companies. We can start with better automation of DBA tasks, but we shouldn't stop there!
Corporate governance is hot – that is, technologies to help companies comply with governmental regulations. Software to enable archiving for long-term data retention, auditing to determine who did what to which piece of data, and security to better protect data are all hot data technologies right now. But database security need to be improve and technologies for securing and auditing data need to be more pervasively implemented.
Metadata is increasing in importance. As data professionals really begin to meld together technology and business, they find that metadata is imperative. But most organizations do not have a metadata repository fully-populated and up-to-date that acts as a lexicon for business data.
And finally, something that isn’t nearly hot enough is data quality and integrity. Tools, processes, and database options that can be used to make data more accurate and reliable are not implemented appropriately with any regularity. So the data stored in our corporate databases is suspect. According to Thomas C. Redman, data quality guru, poor data quality costs the typical company at least ten percent (10%) of revenue. That is a significant cost! Data quality is generally bad in most organizations – and more needs to be done to address that problem.
With all of these thoughts in mind, are you prepared to weather this perfect storm?
As more of the tasks required of DBAs become more automated, the DBA will be freed to expand into other areas. So one front on this storm is the autonomic computing initiatives that automate DBA tasks. At the same time, IT professionals are being asked to know more about the business instead of just knowing the technology. So DBAs need to understand the business purpose and definition of the data they manage, as well as the technological underpinnings of the DBMS. The driving force here is predominantly regulatory compliance. This second front of the perfect storm will cause DBAs to work more closely with metadata to drive database archiving, data auditing, and security to ensure their organization complies with regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, and others.
Regarding the wireless aspect of things, pervasive devices (PDA, handhelds, cell phones, etc.) will increasingly interact with database systems. DBAs will need to get involved there to ensure successful data synchronization. And database systems will work with disconnected data seamlessly, such as data generated by RFID tags.
Yet another big database trend is technology "suck." By that I mean the DBMS is as it sucks up technologies and functions that previously required you to purchase separate software. Remember when the DBMS had no ETL or OLAP functionality? Those days are gone. This will continue as the DBMS adds capabilities to tackle more and more IT tasks.
Another trend impacting DBAs will be a change in some of their roles as more and more of the recent DBMS features actually start being used in more production systems.
The net result of this perfect storm of changes is that data professionals are absolutely being required to do more... sometimes with less (less time, less money, less staff, etc.)
If you know the technology but are then required to know the business, this is doing more – much more. But the technology, in many cases, is also expanding. For example, DB2 9 incorporates native XML. Most DBAs are not XML savvy, but increasingly they will have to learn more about XML as the DBMS technology expands. And this is just one example.
Additionally, data is growing at an ever-increasing rate. Every year the amount of data under management increases (some analysts peg the compound annual rate of data growth at 125%) and in many cases the number of DBAs to manage that growing data is not increasing, and indeed, could be decreasing.
And, budgetary limitations can cause DBAs to have to do more work, to more data, with less resources. When a company reduces budget but demands more work, automation is an absolute necessity. Turning work over to the computer can help (although it is unlikely to solve every administrative issue). Sometimes IT professionals fight against the very thing they excel in – that is, automating work. If you think about it, every computer program is written to automate someone’s work – the write (word processing), the accountant (financials, payroll, spreadsheets), and so on. This automation did not put the executives whose work was automated out of a job; instead it made them more efficient. Yet, for some reason, there is a notion in the IT industry that automating IT tasks will eliminate jobs. You cannot automate a DBA out of existence – but you can make that DBA’s job more effective and efficient with DBA tools and autonomic computing.
And the sad truth of the matter is that there is still a LOT more than can, and should, be done in most companies. We can start with better automation of DBA tasks, but we shouldn't stop there!
Corporate governance is hot – that is, technologies to help companies comply with governmental regulations. Software to enable archiving for long-term data retention, auditing to determine who did what to which piece of data, and security to better protect data are all hot data technologies right now. But database security need to be improve and technologies for securing and auditing data need to be more pervasively implemented.
Metadata is increasing in importance. As data professionals really begin to meld together technology and business, they find that metadata is imperative. But most organizations do not have a metadata repository fully-populated and up-to-date that acts as a lexicon for business data.
And finally, something that isn’t nearly hot enough is data quality and integrity. Tools, processes, and database options that can be used to make data more accurate and reliable are not implemented appropriately with any regularity. So the data stored in our corporate databases is suspect. According to Thomas C. Redman, data quality guru, poor data quality costs the typical company at least ten percent (10%) of revenue. That is a significant cost! Data quality is generally bad in most organizations – and more needs to be done to address that problem.
With all of these thoughts in mind, are you prepared to weather this perfect storm?
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Who Did What to Which Data When... and How?
As the list of government regulations impacting IT grows organizations must adapt to understand and comply with new rules. This increasing compliance pressure is particularly intense on data stored in corporate databases. As such, organization need to be ever more vigilant in the techniques used to protect their data, and monitor access.
Database auditing, sometimes called data access auditing, is one technique growing in popularity as a response to the demands of regulatory compliance. At a high level, database auditing is basically a facility to track the use of database resources and authority. It can be used to help answer questions like “Who accessed or changed data?” and “What was actually changed?” and “When did it change?”
But how you implement your database auditing, especially in a mainframe environment, will have a significant impact on not just "the completeness" of what you capture in the audit trail, but on the performance and availability of your entire environment.
Join me on Wednesday, September 24, 2008 at 10:30 am, Central Daylight Time, for a free webinar where I will discuss the issues and requirements driving database auditing. This presentation can help to serve as a roadmap of sorts for your data access auditing needs.
Database auditing, sometimes called data access auditing, is one technique growing in popularity as a response to the demands of regulatory compliance. At a high level, database auditing is basically a facility to track the use of database resources and authority. It can be used to help answer questions like “Who accessed or changed data?” and “What was actually changed?” and “When did it change?”
But how you implement your database auditing, especially in a mainframe environment, will have a significant impact on not just "the completeness" of what you capture in the audit trail, but on the performance and availability of your entire environment.
Join me on Wednesday, September 24, 2008 at 10:30 am, Central Daylight Time, for a free webinar where I will discuss the issues and requirements driving database auditing. This presentation can help to serve as a roadmap of sorts for your data access auditing needs.
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