Case study:
Two years ago, a clients’ senior DB2 DBA retired unexpectedly. The client had/has two junior DBA’s working under the senior DBA to support the environment. At some point between the senior DBA retiring and eighteen months ago, the client began experiencing two to three overnight production interruptions a month due to a database error. The client was resolving the issue by stopping the production run using the database and restarting it.
The client engaged us to provide several hours of ongoing support a week with one of our senior DB2 DBA’s. The client requested after-hours availability to address the production issues they were having. After an initial assessment and updating of the documentation of the DB2 environment, our consultant was able to identify and fix the after-hours production issue. The issue was caused by inadequate memory allocation during a specific production run. Since the remediation, the client has not experienced any after-hours production issues caused by database issues.
This client’s internal DBA staff is very competent for the years of experience they have. They can comfortably handle the normal day to day DBA activities within DB2. They are eager to learn and have turned to our staff when they have a question about what to do in a given situation. But, in this client’s case, when an uncommon error presented itself that was caused by DB2’s interaction with another software or hardware, they were burning a lot of cycles figuring out a solution.
This is just one example that highlights the benefit of having a person with senior skills working in your environment on a weekly basis. Outside of keeping the software they are supporting running smoothly, they can oftentimes resolve an issue without the need to open a Redbook or a ticket with IBM support.
If your company needs an experienced programmer, call us at 1-844-388-IRON (4766) for more information.
