Best Practices in Database Management
A database does not run itself once it is created. In order to get the most out of it, you need to know and apply a number of database management best practices. These will help you keep data quality high and maximize the database’s performance. Here are six database management practices that should become second nature for your organization.
1. Set Your Business Goals
An effective, targeted database management strategy should reflect your specific business needs. As you set up your database, you must therefore ensure that you are clear about your goals and how the database can serve them.
2. Establish Policies and Procedures
With your goals set and your management strategy in place, craft a detailed set of policies and procedures for data collection, storage, and backup. Working with your database service provider, plan and institute ways to collect and organize data, guard data integrity, and monitor your data. Set benchmarks and alerts that will tell you when problems occur.
3. Prioritize Security
The most important thing is to keep your data safe. Take every measure possible to improve your data security and manage the risks associated with worst-case scenarios. Ensure that you have thorough, detailed backup, recovery, and maintenance plans in place.
4. Focus On The Quality of Data
Once your security measures are in place, the next priority is data quality. Your database strategy should work on promoting high standards of data quality, removing data that doesn’t meet your standards, and adapting quality standards as your strategy shifts.
5. Reduce Duplicate Data
Data duplication reduces the efficiency of your database and can interfere with your strategy. Eliminate it by sharing data quality basics throughout your organization so that the entire company knows the basics of protecting data quality. Steer clear of a siloed approach to data access and management. With every department managing its own data, it is more likely that data will be duplicated.
6. Make Data Easily Accessible
It is important that your users can benefit from your data. All stakeholders must have access to your database so that can enjoy these benefits. Of course, you will want to restrict certain information for users at different levels of your organization, but accessibility should be optimized for each user depending on their security status and access level. Design the database for the user and take note of any feedback you receive from your stakeholders. This feedback can help you improve your database design.
If you would like to set up and maintain a high-functioning database base on all these principles of database management, contact Dimensional Concepts.