The Importance of Developing an Effective Database Management Program

CTRM applications accumulate and produce an enormous amount of data. Up to 73 percent of a company’s data is rarely accessed or completely inactive, but remains in a production database where it eats up expensive storage, backup and computing resources. Dormant data also drives up infrastructure costs. It turns backup and recovery into a lengthy process, as well as diminishes application performance and user productivity. Developing an effective database management program that includes database archiving, purging and maintenance is crucial.

CTRM Applications in the Energy Sector

Most energy companies need to preserve certain data for compliance audits and other business uses. This makes identifying and removing unwanted data a complex and time-consuming process. CTRM Managed Services, combined with our CTRM Expertise On-Demand, bring together the tools and expertise required to implement an effective database management program. The key to streamlining your data and optimizing system performance is through archiving, purging and maintenance.

Identifying and removing inactive data doesn’t have to be complex and time-consuming. The key to streamlining your data and optimizing system performance is through database archiving, purging and maintenance.

Database Archiving

In a CTRM system moving inactive data out of your main database and into an archive database drastically improves performance. There are three main areas that need to be considered during this process, including audit history, pricing data and valuation data. Each holds millions of records so consulting a CTRM expert will help reduce poor SQL queries, indexing and other inefficiencies that can lead to serious performance issues.

Consult a CTRM professional, like the ones on our expertise on-demand team, to quickly identify inactive historic data from your production application. Move that data to a secure archive with data integrity and preserved access in order to:

OPTIMIZE INFRASTRUCTURE

IMPROVE APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

REDUCE LICENSE & STORAGE COSTS

Database Purging

Preserving historical CTRM data is important, but available disk space and system performance inevitably becomes a concern. It is crucial to either increase disk space or remove data. However, organizations are often unprepared for the rapid growth of application data and lack a data purging strategy. This leads to poor application performance.

To prevent poor CTRM application performance:

Application Monitoring

Monitor the application using database analytics or database growth indicators

Data Purging

Use a data purging mechanism to eliminate outdated/irrelevant error logging tables

Data Optimization

First archive data, then purge data after an acceptable time period in order to reduce the size of your database and maximize performance

Database Maintenance

Database administrators (DBAs) are typically responsible for CTRM database maintenance. However, DBAs often lack a deep understanding of CTRM database architectures, which can cause performance issues for your end-user.

CTRM Expertise On-Demand provides knowledgeable professionals who understand CTRM database architecture. Our team manages and performs complex maintenance tasks so you don’t have to, including:

SQL INDEXING REBUILDING & REORGANIZING

PERFOMRING VARIOUS COMPRESSION TECHNIQUES

PERFORMANCE MONITORING

Database Normalization

Optimizing CTRM databases is key to reducing data storage costs, calls and quality issues long-term. Since our team is focused solely on database tuning and performance for these platforms, our methodology addresses common problem areas like valuations. 

In the example below, you will see how our team was able to transform valuations for half-hourly records into daily records and simultaneously remove duplicate data results in a heavily reduced data volume. This resulted in a 94% reduction in valuation database storage for a major Australian utility provider.

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