Technical Approach to Business Startup and Database Monitoring

We can see that technology is an inevitable part of the business, including startups and small scale. To supplement this need, there are various types of technological tools also to support the business model of all classes of business in various industries. What we had initially seen were accounting software and then came ERP solutions, and now the technological influence in business is even in the high-end business decision making too through data-driven analysis.

The major advantage of business-related technological advancement is that it is a leveled playground for all kinds and sizes of businesses. This provides an opportunity for even the smallest of the business to compete in the industry and perform at a scale. All types of businesses now have access to the same kind of technologies and varying scales based on their requirement, which will help improve productivity and also enhance customer engagements. Here, we are discussing the influence of some major technological advancements in business.

Business decision making with technology

As we know, the key to success in any business as a startup is to prepare a solid strategic plan to survive. It is a notable fact that many of the young entrepreneurs are largely dependent on the technology-assisted strategic planning services. These service-as-a-platform solutions offer a wide range of tools to convert ay potential business ideal into a successful venture.

You can find tools for chart generators, expense calculators, financial projections, feasibility analysis, return on investment estimation, business turnover timeline, etc. with the help of such applications. Usage of these tools will help crunch numbers related to business and provide actionable insights to the strategic decision makers. These technological tools could also be used to measure the success rate and performance status of a business which is already running.

Business website development

Nowadays, any sort of business cannot survive without having a proper internet presence. At the first point, it is necessary to have a solid functional website, and it is also important to take measures to promote the reach of the website through various digital marketing techniques. There are many options like CMS-based website development now and also custom web development and hosting services offered by individual providers. Whatever mode you choose, it is important to have a featured website and a solid hosting platform.

Business database management

As we have seen, data is everything for the modern-day businesses and data management services are more functional and sharper than ever before. Database planning is one thing which many of the startup entrepreneurs tend to downplay at the initial phases, but proving out to be a crucial mistake at the later stages.

So, it is important to make sure that all the incoming data is stored properly and managed well in order to be used for analysis and business decision-making purposes. Previously, using the preceding database management techniques, the task was very difficult and cost-intensive, but with the introduction of modern technology in terms of database administration as offered by RemoteDBA.com, high-end database management as a service is now available for small and startup businesses too based on their customized requirements.

Monitoring the database operations

As we found that it is very important to plan and establish the database operations for the success of any startup, let’s now discuss in more details about the concept of database monitoring. Doing this properly will not only give you an overview of the database errors but also could provide you a better insight towards the business operations based on data. Familiarity with database operations will help all levels of business administrators to have a better understanding of business operations.

Monitoring the database errors and alerts

There are two basic modes of monitoring database errors and alerts as:

• Monitoring the DB errors with the use of ‘Trace Files’ and ‘Alert Logs’
• Monitoring the DB operations with the Server-Generated Alerts

The primary and easiest mode of monitoring database errors by looking at the Enterprise Manager Database home page. This section will give you options in monitoring, dictionary views of data, various packages (PL/SQL), and command-line features for data monitoring.

Monitoring DB errors with Trace Files and Alert Log

Each of the server and the background database process will write on to a trace file. While an internal error gets detected, this information will also be dumped onto the trace file. The information written to a trace file is actually meant for the database administrator to tune the applications and database instances accordingly. The major critical errors will also create incidents as well as incident dumps on Automatic Diagnostic Repository. You can find this alert log as a chronological log of all errors as:

• All the internal (ORA-600) errors
• Block corruption (ORA-1578) errors
• Deadlock (ORA-60) errors etc.

It will also create logs for:

• All admin operations like CREATE, DROP, ALTER.
• Statements like STARTUP, ARCHIVELOG, SHUTDOWN
• Errors and messages related to functions of the shared server.
• Messages relating to the dispatcher processes
• Errors occurred during the automatic refreshing of the materialized views

When It comes to Oracle DB, it uses an alert log which records all these operations rather than displaying every information on the operator console. If the operation runs successfully, then a message as ‘completed’ will be written on the log along with a timestamp of it.

This alert log is further maintained in text format and XML format. You can view it in both, or one can even use ADRCI utility in order to view the XML file. One must check the alert log and look at the instances periodically to see whether there are any errors encountered in the background processes.

Oracle database may also write the of initialization parameter values to the alert log along with other key statistics. This alert log and trace files of the server processes also will be written to the Automatic Diagnostic Repository. You can find it at the location DIAGNOSTIC_DEST. Names of these trace files may be OS specific, but each of these files will have the process name included in it like RECO or LGWR, etc.

Similarly, apart from the need to check for error logs, it is important for startup businesses to consider various aspects of database management which can be best done by signing up with any reliable DBaaS (Database-as-a-Service) provider.