Because nearly every application or tool in your tech stack connects to a database, it’s no surprise that 57% of organisations are constantly dealing with database issues.
When teams are responsible for managing the security, reliability, and uptime of multiple databases in a hybrid IT environment on top of their day-to-day tasks, storing and accessing massive amounts of data presents challenges.
However, these teams frequently encounter the same issues across their technology stack and may be unaware of it. Here are the five most common database challenges to look out for and how to solve them.
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Managing Scalability in the Face of Growing Data Volumes
Organizations frequently do not have their databases set up to effectively scale as data volumes continue to grow at a rate of 63% per month on average.
Individual tools and applications are not only delivering larger datasets into databases, but your data is also likely to be updated and queried more frequently.
Your queries are becoming more complex, your data is becoming more dispersed, and you are defining more data relationships. Many relational databases aren’t built to accommodate all of these variables.
Even if your database is designed to scale with your data requirements, you may have to pay to manage and query your growing amount of data. Horizontal scaling can only go so far before the costs of memory upgrades become unsustainable.
All organizations should consider whether they are actually using the data they are storing. As you scale, create retention policies that reduce the amount of data you store.
For example, by erasing transient data in permanent storage, you can reduce the amount of data you store, allowing you to better leverage the storage you have available.
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Keeping Database Performance
Slow database performance is not only inconvenient for your team; it can also cause applications to stall and negatively impact your end users.
It is critical to resolve database performance issues as soon as possible in order to provide the best experience for employees and customers. Aside from scalability concerns, high latency in databases is frequently associated with slow read/write speeds.
Caching to a remote host is one method for scaling databases that do not require frequent updates. This is an excellent way to offload the database, especially if some of your data requires only read-only access.
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Database Access Issues
Even if your organisation implements and regularly monitors database security, you may still encounter security issues due to access permissions.
If you are experiencing database security issues, you must adopt a least-privilege approach. Reducing the number of people with access through role-based access control, attribute-based access control, or a combination of the two reduces the likelihood of insider threats, phishing or malware attacks, and human error, all of which have an impact on the quality of your data.
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Incomplete or incorrect security
Without a doubt, misconfigured security poses a significant risk to databases, especially in cloud environments. Inadequate cloud security without encryption can frequently expose your data to external attacks.
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Data Integrity and Quality Issues
Without data standardization, your organization may encounter database integration issues. Finding and aggregating data for queries is especially challenging when data types and formats are not consistent across all sources.
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