Everyone in the tech world emphasizes the term “bestpractices," but what does it mean exactly? This term refers to a professional tactic or a procedure accepted or prescribed as the most effective or correct.

For instance, take one moment to think about everything you wish or want to do for your database infrastructure, the things you will do for it daily for its effective management. You should also consider the primary categories of the things you wish to manage or tackle, coupled with your database infrastructure management's best practices.

How can you keep databases up-to-date?

Good business owners understand the importance of keeping the database up-to-date. A good database is one that performs well, is recoverable, and available to the end-user without hassles.

The above three factors are a very good beginning point for business owners who intended to start with their databases' best practices. However, with time, they also need to keep pace with technology and understand that the DBA's role is much more advanced than it was 20 years ago.

Let's look at the best practices for the 3 vital aspects of a database- performance, availability, and recoverability one by one-

1.     Best practices for database performance

The best practices for database performance are needed for ensuring the desired performance at the database, application, and system levels-

• The application's performance concentrates on the program code that should be efficient and the access routines of the database. It emphasizes the implementation as well as the configuration of the database.

• The system performance concentrates on the software and the system's hardware needed to operate the application and database. The best practices here are needed to test and monitor the performance of all three areas of the system.

You should determine whether the performance management for your system has been created with triggers that have been specified to qualified DBAs with an exception, or is the system reactive with performance tuning tasks that are only carried out when an employee complains the loudest about the database?

2.     Best practices for availability

The best practices for availability are required to ensure that both the systems and the applications that support your business are available round-the-clock to the end-user.

The best practices that focus on high availability cover monitoring and establish redundancy in the system so that outages can be curbed.

To know more on how the above works, consult experienced professionals from leading database management and support company Remote.DBA.com for queries or assistance.

3.     Best practices for recoverability

The best practices for recoverability are mandatory as they will quickly enable operations to bounce back immediately in any logical or physical failure. This needs database backup planning and data copying strategies, along with testing the feasibility of these backups. The following are specific questions you must ask yourself-

• How has your business ensured database recovery in the event of application issues or hardware problems? 
• How is the quality of protection against incorrect data entry and bad transactions?
• What plans have you made for situations involving disasters? If yes, have they been successful for your business so far?

These 3 points are important, essential to be precise. They should be created in sync with your business's service level requirements along with its allotted budget.

Extra considerations for database infrastructure management

Besides the above factors, there are some extra considerations that you need to pay attention to for optimal database infrastructure management. Let us take a look at them below-

1.     Database schema & change management

This is an important area of database infrastructure management that you should not ignore. To determine the best practices where you should ask yourself the following questions-

• How do you manage this change?
• Do you deploy change management tools, or do you do this by hand?
• Is the database schema in your organization integrated with changes in the application?
• Does the development team in your business deploy DevOps or agile technologies? If yes, is your DBA team integrated with the methodology?
• Regardless of any DevOps process for your business, how does your company co-ordinate these processes to keep all the apps synchronized with the business databases?

2.     Database protection and security

It would help if you did not forget about security and the protection of your database. Note, it is not the DBA's sole duty to determine the layers of security for every piece of the data in the system. It is his job to ensure sufficient protection is incorporated for it. Here, the questions arise-

• Do you deploy the best practices for the business defined as to when and how to use the DBMS's security-centric features?
• Has regularly compliance influenced activities for database activities?
• Have you invested in extra software to ensure compliance?
• What is the policy of compliance in your business?
• Have you audited data access for tracking who and what has been altered in your system's data?
• Do you audit every change or just specific ones to the business applications?
• Do you audit data changes and modifications? If yes, how?

3.     Management of storage

You should not omit storage management. Ask yourself the following questions-

• Do you monitor the active usage of disks for table indexes and spaces?
• Have you set alerts to notify you about an object nearing its maximum capacity?
• Do you supervise extends and regularly consolidate? How do you incorporate the plan?
• Have you made any capacity plan that tracks the time when you need extra processing or storage capacity?

In conclusion, it can be safely said that the above are the major areas where the best practices for database infrastructure should be implemented. To get the custom "best practices" for your business, make sure you test every practice or rely on trials and tribulations given to you by others. There are several best practices that you can implement for your database infrastructure. A qualified DBA will give you tons of them. Consult skilledDBA professionals and ensure that your database infrastructure management is seamless without hassles at all!