Shopping mayhem on the day after Thanksgiving exploded in the 1950s and ’60s, with cops dubbing it Black Friday. Internet shopping put Cyber Monday in the retail lexicon 17 years ago. In 2010, a credit card company coined (pun intended) the title Small Business Saturday.
But enough of the history. The names — commercial, ominous, or otherwise — are here to stay, and the biggest shopping days of 2022 are upon us. There’s a lot at stake, but you know that. Hopefully, your database is running at peak performance to match the high customer demand of the peak shopping days ahead. If not, there’s time left to supercharge your database operations … and make a difference in your bottom line this holiday season.
Speaking of your bottom line, this is probably the time of year when you’re most focused on core business. But database problems (i.e. delayed or broken customer buying experiences) can steal that focus. Options for addressing those problems include hiring DBAs or using managed services. When choosing, consider the differences in time and money:
In-house DBAs
Sounds nice to have DBA expertise on-hand, with people on your staff who can tune performance and monitor your systems around the clock. Nice, indeed, but it’s a tall and costly order.
There’s the monetary cost: The median annual salary for a database administrator is around $100,000 USD (according to U.S. News & World Report, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and others), and that figure can shoot much higher when factoring in the DBA professional’s geographic salary requirements and the specialty needs of your company. Further, if you need more than one DBA, or even an entire team, the salary pain can become unbearable.
There’s also the cost of your time and effort: Data is king, and DBAs are among the most coveted IT professionals. Seeking and landing the DBA talent you need can be frustrating. With a mere 1.5% of DBAs reportedly unemployed (U.S. News), there isn’t much of a candidate pool. The shortage isn’t a new trend, either, and it’s likely to worsen. A 2015 Unisphere Research report showed that more than 40% of data professionals intended to leave the field within the next decade. Since then, there have been thousands of additional DBA openings without the professionals to fill them. According to the Bureau of Labor, there’ll be about 11,500 additional openings for database administrators and architects in the coming decade, with many of those openings attributable to DBAs entering other occupations or retiring.
Managed services for meeting your specific DBA needs
Percona offers an alternative to the cost and frustration of hiring full-time DBAs to keep databases operating at optimal levels. Percona Managed Services keep you in control of your budget. It’s a partnership that provides database management support at a fraction of the full-time DBA cost. You decide the level of support, and you can adjust that level as needs change.
Regardless of your support level, you’ll always have the reassurance of in-depth technical expertise on demand and at an affordable price. Percona DBAs will keep your MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and MariaDB databases running at peak performance so your technical team can focus on your core business. In addition to deep operational knowledge of the aforementioned databases, Percona DBAs also have expertise in the cloud platforms of Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine, as well as Amazon’s DBaaS offering of RDS and Aurora.
Again, you get to decide how and when to apply that expertise. You can use Percona to augment your existing resources, or you can have Percona fully manage your database requirements from start to finish. You also get to define the relationship itself: If you choose to adopt our software and end the relationship, the software is yours. (There’s no lock-in and never any licensing fees.)
Regardless of how you shape the relationship, Percona Managed Services can help your company:
- Stay competitive and agile.
- Operate on-premises and in the cloud.
- Achieve business performance goals.
- Maximize the value of your open source database.
- Reduce cost and complexity.
Keeping the partnership cost-effective, comprehensive, and simple
The final attribute in the list above – reducing cost and complexity – often resonates most loudly. So Percona strives continually to keep the partnership simple and transparent. Along those lines, Percona Managed Services are now part of Percona Platform Subscription, which delivers unified access to open source Percona software, advanced Percona Advisors, Private DBaaS, knowledge base, self-paced training, and more — at no additional cost.
Additionally, with our Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) tool, as included at no cost, you can monitor your database health and behavior, and you can manage and improve the performance of your databases, wherever they are located or deployed. We can do that for you, of course, but as always, it’s up to you.
This time of year can be chaotic, and Percona Managed Services provide an extended team with top database talent so you can focus on strategic initiatives.
Embrace the holiday traffic
Mayhem. Frenzy. Expensive. Sure, they’re potentially scary words during this make-or-break season. But like the names of the Big Three shopping days, they’re just words that paint scenarios, words that represent urgency. Use them as inspiration. Heck, back in the day, “traffic” was a dirty word, especially if it was snowy and muddy and slushy out there.
Now, “traffic” is a beautiful word, as long as you keep it flowing and your database operations tuned up. You can. Seize the day and the season with Percona Managed Services.
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