Many businesses make use of database tools to make their day-to-day work easier. From automated reporting and alerts, to freeing up DBA time and automating workflows, these tools can save a lot of time and effort for a business.
These tools aren’t free, however, and some teams have a hard time working out whether they’re worth the investment for their organisation.
In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the many ways in which database tools can actually offer a good financial return from your investment, saving you both time and money in the long run.
Fewer Tools Means Lower Costs
A large cost for many IT teams is the licensing requirements of the tools that they use. Whether they use different tools for managing and monitoring their server instances or require a different tool for every platform that they work with, the cost of using multiple tools can be steep.
Thankfully, using database tools which can manage any number of instances across any platform means that teams only need to use one tool - cutting their software costs dramatically.
Making use of just one tool for all of their sever work also means that less time needs to be spent on training for new staff, time lost to software updates and maintenance is lowered, and installation costs can be cut too.
Boost DBA Productivity
With older, more limited tools, DBA time can often be wasted or used very inefficiently. Database tools which only allow a small number of instances to be managed at a time, or which don’t support all of the platforms and versions used by an organisation to be managed, can slow down workflows and drop the productivity of your team.
Tools designed to work with scalable databases do away with those problems, allowing DBAs to handle a much higher number of instances at a time, speeding-up their day-to-day work.
Not only is this often less frustrating for DBAs as their work is streamlined, but it can be beneficial to your entire business. DBAs can be freed from monitoring tasks to perform much more urgent tasks elsewhere which are more critical to your operations - potentially saving you money and cutting down on wasted man-hours.
Optimise Your Business
The key to saving money for any organisation is optimisation - ensuring that the right people are in the right place, that your resources are allocated effectively, and that you aren’t wasting money anywhere.
Database tools allow teams to optimise their IT and database operations, giving DBAs a full view of, and total control over, server resources like CPU, disk usage and memory allocation. Tools like this allow DBAs to optimise their server environments to suit usage, rightsizing to cut hardware and software costs as needed without negatively affecting the business.
This sort of overview also enables DBAs to better plan and implement changes to their servers. By removing the guesswork from a DBA’s day, database tools can ensure that every decision taken has a positive effect and helps to optimise the running of your systems.
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In conclusion, the cost of adopting new database tools should be viewed as an investment. Despite their initial cost, tools suited to working with a large number of varied instances can both save you money in the long-term and help to optimise the way that your DBAs work.
By considering the time saved by streamlining DBA workflows, the costs cut from unnecessary software and hardware, and the lower training and maintenance requirements, you can calculate the potential savings for your organisation from adopting new tools.
