The ROI of optimizing your database estate and your data management practices
Use DBtune to deliver a high-performing user experience, free up team capacity resources for strategic priorities, and get more value from your existing infrastructure.
DBtune optimizes database performance through parameter tuning, index optimization, and autovacuum monitoring. Customers have reported up to 10 times higher query performance, and our internal analysis shows transaction rate (TPS) increase of over 20% in production — and that was even before we introduced DBtune 4.0, which includes index optimization.
While we often think about database optimization as just making things go faster, the true impact is multi-dimensional.
- High-performance user experience: Faster queries, expressed as average query response (AQR) times, improve customer satisfaction.
- In eCommerce environments, customers expect response times below 200ms — otherwise they get frustrated, believe that the site is down, and abandon the shopping cart. DBtune-type optimization for these use cases is a no-brainer.
- The same is true in analytics situations. Dashboards that refresh in seconds instead of minutes are a lot more useful. Reports that take hours will always be loathed. The speed at which a query responds really matters.
- Reduced cost: Increased TPS allows us to get more work done on the same hardware — thus, cost per transaction goes down. Increasing TPS by 20% or more has multiple impacts:
- We free up capacity immediately. New projects can be serviced on the same hardware—no need to wait for hardware procurement or get additional budget.
- We can consolidate database infrastructure. Many companies use a “1 VM/1 Database Server” approach, and they run 5-10 VMs on one hardware server. Increasing TPS by 20% allows them to consolidate hardware. Four servers can now do the work of five. This allows users to decommission old hardware and focus on newer, more efficient hardware. It also reduces hardware-server-driven license costs for the operating system and the virtualization layer.
- Enterprises see growing demand for database capacity — often in the 5%-10% range year over year. Increased efficiency can slow that growth, and in conjunction with optimization-driven infrastructure consolidation, it can even reverse that trend.
- Operational excellence: Intelligent, AI-driven tooling frees DBAs from manual tuning tasks and helps move them from reactive work to proactive, more strategically valuable work. Experts estimate that DBAs spend over 20% of their time on tuning tasks (some reports think that performance problems take up to 60% of a DBA’s time). Tools like DBtune analyze workloads and derive improvement recommendations, making DBAs significantly more productive and allowing more junior, less experienced staff to be more effective.
- Database administration is a sought-after skill, and most customers complain that they cannot find enough experienced talent. AI tooling that supports the DBAs and makes them more productive can help alleviate this problem.
- DBAs, especially experienced DBAs, need to spend more time on strategically important tasks, such as data quality, data governance, and collaboration with developers to create high-performance solutions. AI tools that take over routine maintenance, such as performance optimization, reduce firefighting and help managers rebalance how they use their talent.
Thus, database optimization — a task that is often considered to be a purely technical exercise — can have a significant impact on customer satisfaction (through faster queries), operational excellence (DBA productivity), capital expenditures (reduced hardware cost), and operational expenditures (reduced license cost).
Contact us, and we will work with you to establish the ROI of using DBtune to optimize your data estate and your data management practices.
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