Database Management Software For Greater Efficiency
If your company is using more than one database of any significant size, then you certainly are aware of the effects that occur when the databases slow down. Not only do inefficient databases annoy users, but they also waste your company’s valuable resources by taking up more time and energy, and increasing labor to both access and repair your database.
Fortunately, there are some simple steps you can take to help make your databases more efficient. These steps are simple enough that even a person who is not a software architect can undertake them, through the use of today’s user-friendly database management software. Making your databases more efficient will save you a great deal of time and money in the long run.
The first step you can take to make your databases more efficient is to index your fields. Indexing is a process by which the computer internally sorts the data in your fields in its memory so that it can access this data more quickly. Indexing doesn’t change how you access your data -- it only changes how quickly your database management software can find your data.
In most databases, most fields that people use in searches and queries should be indexed. Be efficient and do not spend time indexing fields that are of little use or are rarely or never queried. For example, in a high level payment system, it may make sense to index the customers’ names and their payment amounts, but it would probably be of little to index their internal identification numbers.
Something else that can be done to increase the speed of your queries is to remove old and unwanted data. That information comes in a number of different flavors. Among these are multiple copies of the same record, information lost to antiquity or records that do not conform to the standard. More recent types of database management software automatically discard many of these unnecessary records.
Bad data is the bane of databases. This kind of data makes it harder for uses to sort and search because they waste time dealing with useless entries. Bad data slows down the entire database, requiring more time to access, search, or sort. The solution is to archive rarely needed data automatically so that it doesn’t get in the way of most searches and sorts. This will pay off dramatically over time in improved efficiency and lower labor costs.
A number of extremely simple steps can be taken to make your database operate more efficiently. By using today’s database management software, you can undertake these steps. It doesn’t take a software architect to run the operations that will cause your databases to run more efficiently. For most databases, most fields should be indexed. Index fields that people use in searches and queries. You do not need to index fields that are never or very rarely searched, sorted, or queried. For example, in a high level payment system, you might index customer names and payment amounts, but you would probably not index the customer’s internal ID.