Database Integration

Your database is clearly one of the most important aspects of your IT infrastructure. Ongoing maintenance, optimization, and disaster recovery procedures are all important aspects of protecting your data. As your business grows, these issues become more vital as both the number of transactions processed and the overall overall volume of data increases. MDS's database consulting methodology includes, but is not limited to, the following tasks:

• Defining requirements - Quality database design and database application software development is predicated on an accurate definition of the business process requirements. Our database consultants have many years of experience designing databases for a myriad of different industries and functional requirements. This enables us to formulate a concise database design document that will be a conceptual overview of the database. This document will become the blueprint for your project and will also serve as a design artifact once your project is completed.

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• Design the database - Once the requirements are known and the use cases defined, the database design consultant can begin the actual process of building the database model. This process often involves a database architect assembling all of the required data elements and then defining database tables based upon database normalization rules. Additional design elements include the analysis of appropriate key structures and identification of stored procedures and triggers required for optimal database performance and reliability.

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• Build test requirements - Using the information defined in the requirements, use case, and database design processes, our database consultant can build a test plan of required activities. In addition to the obvious final testing, these activities will include component and unit test criteria necessary to identify dependencies required in the development plan.

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• Performance Analysis - In order to maximize performance, we can recommend various tuning techniques including the proper indexing of your tables, data file disk allocation schemes, server hardware issues, query, view, and stored procedure optimization, and many other strategies that will keep your database running efficiently.
  
  For existing systems, one way we accomplish this is to benchmark some of your more resource intensive queries and stored procedures. By analyzing the overheard in terms of memory and CPU usage, execution time and the query plan, we can make recommendations to reduce load and increase performance. Record locking optimization is another aspect of this analysis that can ensure data integrity and efficient performance.

Another important element in ensuring reliability and performance is designing and implementing a proper maintenance and backup plan for your database. Secure, off-site backups are crucial to any disaster recovery plan. In addition, rebuilding indexes and statistics regularly are critical to ensure that performance and speed are maintained as your users access the database throughout the day.

In terms of decision support and reporting, you may benefit from setting up a data mart to support this activity. We can build a data repository that is optimized and normalized to allow you to slice and dice your data so you can properly analyze your business activity. MS SQL Server Reporting Services, Crystal Reports, Xcelsius are some of the tools we have used to build reporting portals for our clients.