Big database

Managing and operating a big database so that it optimally contributes to the operations and product of your business is not a negligible concern. Your big data dba needs to ensure that you:

• Have a backup and recovery option installed – the big database IS your business. If it collapses and can’t recover then your business can’t recover.
• Have a well defined big data management architecture and operating procedure in place.
• to administer your big database. It takes special training to administer a big database – that is what you need a specialized big data dba (big database administrator) servicing you big database.

Backup and recovery

If you have any experience whatsoever with backup/restore, then you know how much of a hassles backing up databases to tapes and restoring them from tape can be. All these hassles are cubed for particularly big databases.

Can any tape, which under ideal laboratory conditions process no more than 2 TB per hour, function with multi TB big database? Should you rely on disk-to-disk or mirroring strategies, maybe even an SAN topology? Do multi TB big databases render “backup windows” useless, it is organizationally intolerable to free the database for the period required to copy its data to tape or disk?

To answer these questions and devise a backup and recovery mechanism which is right for your big database and business, you need a comprehensive big data management system and a big data dba to help you design and implement it.

Big data management 

So how does optimized data management of big data look like? First of all, stop hosting reference data on your most expensive equipment. Reference data, data that is often accessed but rarely modified, but that is nonetheless left on databases for reference purposes. You need to segregate this data from frequently modified/updated data and to keep it backed up on tapes (which do not need to be constantly updated). If the database collapses, this “pre-staged” data can be kept at the recover center and immediately be loaded from tape to disk while the IT guys are still travelling to the emergency recovery center. Only backups the changing components of the database would be transported.