Help for database pros working from home

Who says database pros lose productivity when working at home?  

I’m fortunate, I’ve been working from home for 20 years. And, in a previous life, I’ve been a DBA and developer. So, I really get it. I see this situation all too clearly. I know if I were still a DBA or a developer, I’d be looking for ways to collaborate, to stay on top of things, and to prove that I’m as valuable working from home as I am in the office. 

DBAs still have to solve problems with the databases they’re responsible for, besides doing normal maintenance and building new databases. 

Developers have to write good database code and make sure it runs accurately and performs well enough to meet the application’s response time SLA. 

These people are judged on metrics like speed and quality of their work.  Quest® provides all sorts of ways to stay effective at all of those things no matter where “work” is located. Whether you have suddenly been thrown into a work-from-home position due to COVID-19, or if you’ve always worked from home, whether you plan to return to the office after COVID-19 has resolved or you want to continue to work from home, keep reading. These solutions will help.

Twelve ideas for boosting productivity and teamwork, and easing some worries, while working from home

While working from home, especially if it is not how you’re accustomed to spending your work days, you still need to juggle a lot of work tasks—not to mention life demands that you need to juggle at this time.  You likely still have deadlines, teams to stay connected with and accomplish things with, and pieces of the IT puzzle that you’re uniquely responsible for fitting into place.

Following are 12 ways that Quest Software solutions help database professionals be productive and effective team members while at home. If these products are new to you, follow the links for more information—best of all, we offer free trials. 

1. Keep tabs on database performance. The Foglight® web interface works from anywhere, to stay on top of database performance. No command line or unfamiliar scripts to learn, maintain, and execute while working alone.  Let Foglight do the heavy lifting and show you what you need to see.
2. Diagnose database performance bottlenecks quickly. Have a work laptop at home?  Keep Spotlight® running on it, just as you do in the office for real-time diagnostics of performance issues.
3. Distractions and noise happen, but true problems need to surface. Foglight offers flexibility in easily setting up, and altering, email distribution of alarms. Make sure you (or whoever is appropriate) gets the message when something is going wrong.
4. You likely don't do your coding in a vacuum. Share your database code with your teammates, DBAs, DevOps engineers, and others by taking advantage of  tight and consistent source control integration offered by Toad® for Oracle and ApexSQL.
5. You likely don’t do your coding in a vacuum, Part 2. Share data, data visualizations, objects, scripts, and code with your colleagues quickly with Toad for Oracle Team Coding and Toad Intelligence Central.
6. Data analytics is still important, maybe in brand new ways. Prepare data for data analysts using the same Toad Data Point interface on your laptop that you use in the office and place the data where remote colleagues can get to it.
7. Communicate concerns visually, clearly with application teams. Prove to application teams, no matter where they are working, using a Foglight Performance Investigator for Oracle or SQL Server report or screen capture, that they do indeed have “offensive database queries” that need to be tuned or rewritten.
8. War rooms erupt, still. Contribute important evidence/proof to an operations and/or business area “war room” discussion in the wake of an urgent database performance problem our outage using the Foglight extensive diagnostics and historical investigation capabilities—what are possible database causes and what evidence exists that it was NOT a database issue that caused the problem.
9. Managing new database types isn’t easy. Toad family products can help keep everyone productive in managing databases even if one isn’t an expert on some platform. Toad for Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 or SAP, Toad Edge for MySQL or Postgres (and in beta, Redshift).
10. Ease worries about Oracle database migrations to the cloud. Everyone managing Oracle instances can gain back some peace of mind knowing that Shareplex® is keeping their migrations of Oracle data to that new cloud platform working well with minimal interruption for applications/users, and with reliable fall-back if needed.
11. Automate for simpicity, consistency, and protection of production. Automate for simplicity, consistency, and protection of production. With Toad DBA edition, you have the capability to automate tasks like schema compares and synchronizations, reports, or dozens of other tasks. Schedule those tasks and know that they’ll be performed when they should be, every time.  

And now, Benchmark Factory can be used to automate load testing as part of a continuous integration build pipeline.  Load testing can ensure that new or altered parts of an application are not affecting other areas of the application – the last thing your team needs with so many other things going on.  How code will perform if many users execute it at once can be validated prior to production.  Watch this video by my colleague Mathew Phan for an explanation: video on Toad World.

12. Don't ease up on protecting data and proving compliance. Compliance with external regulations like GDPR, SOX, PCI, HIPAA, etc., is not eased even during a pandemic.   ApexSQL Audit can help your SQL Server customers prove to the auditors that they have measures in place to achieve compliance (saving, potentially, large amounts of money in fines).  Again, peace of mind is a valuable thing these days.

I hope this information has been helpful. Watch for more blogs about working from home. If you’re a developer or DBA—or have anything to do with database management, odds are, folks at Quest have walked in your shoes.

We’re here to help.

Related information

Blog: Two ways database performance affects #WorkingFromHome [IT and COVID-19]

Blog: Database development and management while working from home [IT and Covid-19]

Information Management Remote Solutions: Database Management While Working from Home

Got questions?

If you’ve got questions, we’ve got answers. Contact us!

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Toad Data Point forum

Foglight forum

Shareplex forum

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