DocsAutoDBAIntroduction

Introduction

Overview

CrystalDB AutoDBA is the industry’s first automated DBA integrated with a PostgreSQL service. PostgreSQL has over 300 configuration parameters—if they are not adjusted correctly, its performance can suffer. However, it can be a challenge even knowing where to start tuning it.

You should not need DBA skills to run PostgreSQL reliably and efficiently in the cloud. Except for complex applications, which require human DBAs to achieve optimal performance in complex applications, automation can already do the job alone.

Two premises inform our approach:

  1. Database administration will eventually be entirely automated.
  2. Automated database administration works best when integrated with the cloud service.

CrystalDB’s AutoDBA is always on, monitoring your workload and system, and making adjustments as needed. You may still be able to tune it better, but you can rest assured that the first level of response is already taken care of.

Why use AutoDBA?

PostgreSQL comes with several knobs that need to be set in a specific way depending on the workload and the hardware. This makes it powerful and flexible but also complicates its use. Sometimes a person with specialized skills, a DBA, is necessary; sometimes developers or others may pick up some of the DBA skill set.

We entrust our DBAs with many responsibilities: Even in an organization with many skilled DBAs, there is always too much to do, which holds back progress. In some cases, organizations choose to abandon relational databases altogether, opting for NoSQL, but this just shifts the problem around rather than making things more efficient.

AutoDBA can help. It picks up the mundane tasks, freeing up DBAs to spend time on design and other high-value activities. In smaller organizations, developers can confidently run PostgreSQL without learning DBA skills.

Ask yourself whether any of the following apply to your organization. If so, AutoDBA can help:

  • Are you spending too much time optimizing your databases? Do you know how well optimized they are?
  • Are your databases provisioned with the optimal amount of capacity?
  • Is managing multi-tenancy a headache for your SaaS business?
  • Do you know what your next scalability bottleneck will be?
  • Is your product development process backed up on migrations? Do you worry whether a release could cause an outage?
  • Have bad query plans or failure to vacuum or analyze tables caused performance degradation or incident response?
  • Do you know how many 9s of uptime to expect from your high-availability configuration?
  • Do you know whether your database is configured securely?
  • Are you sure your backups will be usable when you need to restore them?

CrystalDB’s unique approach

Our approach is a first for the industry. Prior management tools were designed to connect to existing databases and help their human operators run them better. In contrast, our AutoDBA integrates deeply with the CrystalDB managed service, which improves performance and makes the automation more robust.

We also took an engineering approach to building AutoDBA. We break down the automation challenge into distinct problems and design solutions tailored to each one. The limits of these solutions are understood, so the system only assumes management tasks that it is designed to succeed at. This allows AutoDBA to take full control of certain administrative functions. It is always on and can respond faster and more confidently than any human DBA could.