Autonomous Administration Capabilities
Database administrators ensure that databases run efficiently and securely. They are responsible for maintaining databases. They monitor and update anti-malware software. Modern platforms for data warehouses should have autonomous administrative capabilities with minimum but be flexible enough to be interjected at any point of time.
Self-repair is an important ability of a system that can regularly check, detect, and repair or heal damage or malfunctions within its day-to-day operations without human intervention; e.g., automatic updates of major and minor database versions. This will increase reliability, reduce maintenance costs, and increase security and uptime.
High availability means having working database clusters without disruption. Having easily deployable and highly available databases offered via a managed service is a significant benefit for all kinds of workloads and applications. A highly available database is typically a cluster of three nodes, which is composed of a primary database node and two replicas. While undergoing maintenance or in case of node failure, there is another node available to make sure your application does not experience downtime. In case of a database on a virtual machine, the service will replace the non-working/problem nodes with working nodes, use monitoring tools to see the real-time state of the VM, and use that feedback to check the state of faulty nodes. A DHCP (dynamic host configuration protocol) server can be configured and reclaim new network addresses. Organizations can set up the node monitor to conditionally re-spawn/restart. Irrespective of the reason for the shutdown, a notification email is recommended for administrative activities. The expectation for modern data warehouses is that downtime should be less than three microseconds.
The self-securing capability includes multiple things. First, it includes patching of the operating system and security patching while running, without or with only minimal disruption. Second, having encryption always on encrypts selected columns in the DB that can be queried. Third, databases have the ability to regularly monitor for bugs and cyber-attacks and other levels of security, which can be proactively found, if not fully resolved. In case of disruption, the database should be able to remediate from the last version of the database as soon as possible.
