NoSQL solutions like MongoDB are gaining popularity over traditional table-based relational database management systems (RDBMS) like MySQL. The greatest benefits of NoSQL over RDBMS are:
- With RDBMS, you need a string in the query language (SQL or Structured Query Language) parsed by the DB system. This is dangerous as it exposes your database to SQL injection attacks. NoSQL, on the other hand, is object-oriented, meaning you pass a document with an explanation of what you are querying. There is no parsing.
- You will not be responsible for defining the schema when using NoSQL like MongoDB. You only need to drop in documents and any two documents in a collection do not have to be in the same field. In RDBMS like MySQL, you have to define tables and columns before storage.
- NoSQL performance is better than RDBMS performance because NoSQL sacrifices JOINS and it has tools that are very good in performance analysis. MySQL, the poster child of RDBMS, is criticised for poor performance, especially when it comes to ORM applications.
- If you want to save money (as all businesses do), MongoDB is a good choice because the MapReduce feature allows for easy scalability where you get full functionality even on low-cost hardware. You also save on cost and development time with NoSQL like MongoDB since you do not need a fine-grained model since it is non-relational.
You could hire an in-house team for MongoDB or hire top remote DBA experts. Most companies/organizations hire in-house teams with cost and data security in mind, but the benefits of outsourcing the service far outweigh the benefits of hiring an in-house team.
Cost Benefits
You actually save money when you outsource database administration since you will not have to pay salaries and other benefits at the end of every month, even when your DBA has not done much. On average, a full-time DBA will cost you over $80,000 per year and over $5,000 in training every year. It is particularly important that you outsource DB management for cost reasons if you have a stable database since you will not be able to justify the cost of an in-house DBA to your stakeholders. You can negotiate the contract with a remote DBA expert in such a way that you only pay for the services rendered. You also save money on office space, equipment, and logistics.
Peace of Mind – Hiring a professional for the job allows you to concentrate on running your core business. You will have peace of mind when you outsource the service since you will know an expert is on the job and you are covered in case something goes wrong (keeping in mind that responsibility of the database management shifts from you to the remote DBA when you outsource the service). There is indeed reason to worry if you have not hired a professional for the job since downtime means lost revenues, a reputation nightmare, and the risk of losing customers and potential customers. You need not worry when your DBA is sick or on leave since a remote DBA team will always have someone monitoring your database.
Institutional Memory – The average time a top DBA will stay on one job is three years. With remote database administration, you need not worry about loss of institutional memory since you can stick with the same team for as long as you want. Losing DBAs to competitors puts you at a risk of losing confidential technology to competitors. It also means a difficult transition period as the new DBA familiarizes him/herself with your database.
Technical Skills – The greatest benefit of hiring a remote DBA team for MongoDB database management is that a remote DBA team will have the expertise necessary for the job. MongoDB is a relatively new technology, meaning many DBAs are not familiar with its nitty-gritty. With a remote DBA team, you get a team that has such skills as:
- Replication and load balancing over several servers
- Aggregation operation and batch processing using MapReduce
- The use of shard keys for horizontal scaling
- Search by field, regular expression searches, and range queries
- Indexing
A remote DBA will have worked for several organizations while your in-house DBA will only be working for you. A remote DBA, therefore, has a better grip on industry trends and is more confident in his daily activities. The experience of remote DBA experts means you get valuable tips on what you need to do for a reliable and effective database.
Monitoring and Reporting – A remote DBA will constantly monitor all areas of your database. A good remote DBA company will have sophisticated sets of proprietary scripts for automated DB reporting, pre-outage alerts, and capacity planning. Monitoring is important because it allows you to prevent a potentially catastrophic problem before it occurs. You should go for a company that has these two types of reports:
- Tuning reports: These reports help in identifying object-level I/O problems and they perform caching operations automatically. They also alert a DBA of potentially critical performance problems like missing indexes.
- Trend reports: These reports establish baseline signature for your DB. Exception reports generate from this signature to identify abnormal DB conditions. There are trend reports for all major areas of MongoDB such as memory usage, DB internal metrics, and CPU utilization.
- Exception reports: These reports reach the inbox of the responsible manager on a daily basis. They show the times when the DB is experiencing stress and they go beyond the normal monitoring and keep track of the processing environment, reporting on RAM and CPU-related problems.
- Capacity planning reports: These are reports emailed to the responsible manager on a weekly basis with a summary of the activities carried out in the prior week as well as total growth for the week.
Most in-house DBAs are unlikely to dedicate too much time to monitoring since they usually work for 8 hours a day and they have other tasks in the organization. It would take more than one DBA to generate all these reports, meaning increased running costs.
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