Our teams may spend a lot of time taking care of the database. This is very reasonable as we should ensure nothing breaks and we can continue our business. However, wouldn’t it be better if we didn’t need to look after the database? What if I told you it’s possible and you don’t need to maintain your database? Read on to understand how.
Help Developers Avoid Problems
Developers often struggle to address issues because they lack visibility into the system's inner workings. Just as they use debuggers and profilers, they need tools that provide comprehensive insights into database activities. Observability must be integrated throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC) to address this. Developers need to understand how their SQL queries are executed and access execution plans and database activity details. They require immediate feedback on query performance during development, without waiting for load tests to finish.
OpenTelemetry can help achieve this by integrating with developer environments and databases to capture queries, extract execution plans, and analyze them for actionable insights. This allows developers to determine if queries will perform well in production. Additionally, OpenTelemetry can be used in production to extract execution plans for live queries, ensuring continued performance monitoring.
Once we have OpenTelemetry in place, we don’t need to solve any issues in production because we simply avoid them. That makes one thing less to worry about.
Help Your Teams Automate Everything
Manual processes are not feasible. To increase speed and efficiency, we need to automate as much as possible. This requires building observability into all our systems and databases. We must continuously capture execution plans, statistics, configuration changes, schema migrations, and any factors that might impact database performance. Using automated reasoning, we can detect anomalies and identify why performance issues arise.
With this data, we can develop self-healing mechanisms, allowing databases to automatically resolve issues based on detailed diagnostics. We can quickly identify necessary index additions, configuration adjustments, and solutions for slow queries.
This makes our databases run better and avoids performance bottlenecks. We can avoid issues and make the database self-heal itself. This lets us forget about the database entirely.
Put People in Control
Finally, developers need to take ownership of their databases, changing their mindset to embrace working with databases. This shift allows them to ensure database reliability and prevent system downtime.
While it might seem like this adds to their workload, it doesn't. With automated observability and actionable insights, developers can shift from manual troubleshooting to automated solutions, focusing only on what's crucial. Effectively, developers don’t need to do anything to maintain the database. They just need to make sure they follow the right approach and that automated solutions do not break.
Metis provides everything needed to manage your databases effectively. It can analyze queries and establish observability by capturing execution plans, configurations, schema changes, and all factors influencing database performance. Metis automates monitoring, detects anomalies, and resolves them automatically. If an issue can't be fixed, Metis alerts you for necessary business decisions. Ultimately, Metis enables you to forget about database maintenance.
