Your business — like all modern businesses — relies on a mountain of mission-critical data. That makes it essential that you keep your databases secure, optimized, and available.

Finding the right person or team to manage database tasks should be a top priority for any organization, but many businesses rely on a single database administrator or even someone without DBA expertise.

This article looks at the benefits of choosing DBA consulting to optimize and protect your data.

What is a database administrator (DBA)?

A database administrator (DBA) is a professional who provides expertise and guidance in the management, design, implementation, and optimization of databases within an organization. For example, they might offer services such as:

  • Database development
  • Database backup monitoring and validation
  • High availability clustering and disaster recovery
  • System performance issue root cause analysis
  • Patching and upgrades
  • Query performance tuning and optimization
  • Stored procedure development
  • ETL development and maintenance
  • Data warehousing
  • Report development

Your DBA can be a full-time employee, but finding and hiring a database administrator with all the necessary skills can be challenging. Plus, if that person leaves the company   or goes on vacation, you have no one looking after your valuable data.  We recommend working with a team of expert consultants.

Here are the top 6 reasons  you need DBA consulting.

6 benefits of DBA consulting for your business

1. Save money

A DBA consulting company can save you money in a number of ways.

First of all, when you work with a DBA consultant, you only pay for the services you need. For many companies, a full-time database administrator is overkill. DBA managed service providers put in the time you require and can scale up if your needs grow.

Furthermore, improving database performance can improve resource efficiency and reduce operational costs. Even more importantly, an expert DBA can ensure that you don’t experience costly data loss or downtime.

2. Save time

Outsourcing to a DBA consulting firm takes database tasks off of your team’s plate and lets you concentrate on other valuable work.

DBA consultants also save you time by proactively finding issues before they become critical. This early detection and swift resolution can minimize the time spent on troubleshooting.

3. Access a team of experts

An individual DBA has limited time and many have limited skill sets. When you contract with a consultancy, you have access to an entire team with a wide range of knowledge.

Working with a team makes it easier to get in touch. Even if your primary contact is unavailable, others will have been briefed on your environment and be ready to answer questions or solve problems.

4. Get 24X7 coverage

Unlike a single full-time employee, a DBA consulting firm can ensure that someone is always available to respond to critical alerts.

5. Improve performance and security

Many organizations don’t have a real DBA at all, but a system administrator that performs some basic DBA functions. If this is the situation in your business, you’re missing out on potential improvements to performance and security.

Regular tuning and database optimization can keep performance high. Expert DBAs know how to examine performance wholistically and identify issues with network bandwidth, storage latency, virtual machine configuration, drive configuration, SQL Server configuration, blocking, locking, missing indexes, query optimization, resource contention, and more.

On the security side, DBAs establish and manage access controls, implement audit trails and monitoring mechanisms, conduct vulnerability assessments, apply security patches and more to further fortify the system against evolving threats.

6. Achieve scalability and future-proofing

A skilled DBA can ensure that your databases scale with your business. They keep your systems up-to-date so your data remains optimized, secure, and available.

Work with us

Emergent Software offers a full range of SQL Server consulting services including ETL development, data warehousing, business intelligence and report development, database cloud migration, SQL Server environment assessments, regular health checks and security audits, database backup and maintenance, and more.

Get in touch to talk about DBA consulting for your business.