You are in:
West Midlands’ Quest for data growth
West Midland’s DBA team faces an ever-increasing volume of data that impacts the performance of its critical end-user systems. In order to keep up with its data growth, West Midlands Police turned to Quest Software.
West Midlands Police has more than 90 databases, mostly Oracle-driven, with a handful based on SQL Server. With the exception of command and control these databases hold virtually all data produced by the force.
Each day, as many as 1,500 records in the West Midlands area are entered into the force’s databases. Because of the varying amount of input to the databases, capacity planning was difficult for the force’s DBA team. Maintaining reasonable performance levels became problematic.
As the databases volumes grew, capacity checks became a major responsibility for the DBA team, with each of the three members spending at least five hours per week on it. To ensure users would not be affected by volume growth or any dips in performance, the DBA team needed a solution to help them proactively manage its databases and systems.
West Midlands Police had previously leveraged Quest Software to improve the performance of the national HOLMES system, using what is now Quest Central for Oracle. (The HOLMES system collates records of large-scale crimes requiring the resources of more than one police force.) “We tested Quest’s Spotlight and Foglight solutions and it quickly became obvious that they would meet our all our requirements,” explained Bob Wellings, senior database administrator, West Midlands Police Force. “The central console would provide us with full visibility of all our databases on one screen, saving us huge amounts of time.” As a result, the force purchased both solutions for Oracle, Unix and Windows environments.
Spotlight allows administrators to anticipate and correct database and system performance issues. Foglight monitors each component of the technology stack in real time, detecting potential problems and alerting application managers before performance suffers.
The Quest solution provides West Midland Police with e-mail alerts, allowing it to proactively manage performance.
The DBA team now feels more in control of its environment. “Now we can rely on Spotlight and Foglight to tell us about any issues before our users are affected,”
