The database domain is constantly evolving, with innovations emerging rapidly and today’s cutting-edge systems becoming tomorrow’s legacy. Despite our best efforts, issues can still arise in production. Faulty code may be deployed, slow schema migrations may occur, or unexpected surges in traffic may overwhelm our systems. Here, we explore three key trends in the database landscape that can help us maintain optimal database reliability.
Observability Is the King
The first trend focuses on troubleshooting and monitoring. Developers often struggle to address problems because they lack visibility into what’s happening. Just as they use debuggers and profilers, they also need tools that provide comprehensive insight into database activities and surrounding processes.
Observability must be embedded throughout the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC) to address this. Developers should be able to see how their SQL queries are executed, access execution plans, and monitor database activity details. They shouldn’t have to wait for load tests to finish; instead, they need to verify the performance of their queries while developing changes.
This is where OpenTelemetry comes into play. By integrating it into developer environments and databases, queries can be captured, execution plans extracted, and analyses conducted to deliver actionable insights. This helps determine whether queries will perform well in production. Additionally, the same approach can be applied in production to extract and assess execution plans for live queries.
Automating All the Things
The second trend centers on how we deploy changes and modify databases. Manual processes are no longer sufficient. To move quickly and enhance development velocity, automation is essential. This requires building observability into all our systems and databases.
It’s crucial to continuously capture execution plans, statistics, configuration changes, schema migrations, and any other factors that could impact database performance. Automated analysis can then be applied to detect anomalies and identify the reasons behind performance slowdowns.
With this level of insight, we can create self-healing mechanisms. Databases can be enabled to automatically resolve issues, as we have all the necessary details to pinpoint why problems arise. This allows us to immediately identify which indexes to add, configurations to adjust, and slow queries to optimize.
Ownership to Rule Them All
Lastly, we need to emphasize ownership. Developers must shift their mindset to recognize that they can and should work directly with databases. This approach empowers them to ensure database reliability and prevent system downtime.
At first glance, this might appear to add more responsibilities for developers. Fortunately, that’s not true. With automated observability and actionable insights, developers simply shift their workload. Issues can be resolved automatically, allowing them to concentrate on what truly matters. However, embracing this new reality means taking full ownership of their databases, and managing them from start to finish.
Metis Lets You Get Control of Your Databases
Metis provides everything you need to take full control of your databases. It analyzes your queries and enhances observability by capturing execution plans, configurations, schema changes, and any factors that influence database performance.
Metis automates the monitoring process, detecting anomalies and resolving them automatically. When issues require intervention, Metis promptly alerts you, signaling the need for business decisions. Ultimately, Metis empowers you to take complete ownership of your databases from start to finish.
