Your DBA Is Absent: What Now?

When you find yourself running a company and your business is steadily growing, one day you might feel the need to hire people. As the business grows, most people in the executive branch (CTO, CEO, etc.) might feel the growing need to hire developers, designers, and also database administrators. Database administrators might complete their work very well, but sometimes they might need to go for some vacation for a day or two – once they leave, what do you do then? Hiring somebody to replace them isn’t a very smart idea because of the fact that you probably don’t have enough time to do so in the first place, and waiting for the DBA to come back to assist you probably isn’t the smartest idea either – when you need help, you usually need help now, not after a week or two once the DBA would be back.

What Are Your Options?

Once you notice that your DBA is missing or absent, you don’t need to panic. Indeed, in this space you have a couple of options: most of technical directors already know what to do – they would usually turn to tools to solve this issue. Tools, in this space, can be very, very helpful: especially tools, targeted towards database instances. One of those tools is ClusterControl by Severalnines, the other: CCX by the same company containing worldwide database experts – Severalnines. There are many other tools, but these two are developed by worldwide database experts meaning that it can easily act as a virtual DBA that you can always, 24/7, count on!

CCX By Database Experts

Head over to CCX developed by Severalnines and create an account. Once you’re done with creating accounts, you are free to log in to the system. Once you have logged in to CCX, you are free to deploy a data store by creating Create data store towards the right hand side. We can see that in this case, we already have a data store that is deployed:

We can see that CCX, in this case, tells us if our data store is available or not, what database cluster is it running, how many nodes it has, and whether it has any associated cloud providers – in this case, it’s AWS situated in the North of Europe. We can also see that this data store is running a couple of queries per second.

Click on the data store and you will see an overview of the state of your services, and you will also see some instance information – all without asking a DBA anything. Yes, that’s true!

If your services are running fine, all is well, but if not, CCX will fix all of the issues for you! Click on the Services tab and you will see a list of all of the running (or not running) services together with their types, roles, and some connection information:

You might have another question – just how do you go around monitoring your database instances when your DBA is not around? With CCX, that’s as easy as never before! Simply click on the monitoring tab and you will see the load average of your database instances, how much CPU and RAM is used by your database instances, you can also choose a set of ranges and “tell” your database instance according to what preset range you want the statistics you want to be generated:

Is that it? You wish! If you don’t have a DBA, you probably also have a lot of other things to take care of including observing how your queries are doing – click on the Query Stats and you will be able to observe a bunch of query statistics too:

CCX also allows you to add users and databases – if you don’t have a DBA, chances are that you might need to add one or a couple of them sooner or later, and CCX also comes with the ability to back up your data:

The backup schedule can be found on the Settings tab of CCX. Impressed yet?

That’s far from everything CCX can offer for your business, too: CCX also comes with a firewall, but to understand everything that CCX developed by database experts can offer for your business, you would need to observe all of its functionalities yourself.

Summary

As you can probably tell by now, CCX can help you with a bunch of different things, even when your DBA is absent: however, in order to unearth its full power, you would need to take a look at everything yourself. Make use of CCX today and see how it can impact your business!