5 Ways to Supercharge Your Database Management Processes

Database management can be a total nightmare. Implementing a data matching software tool like this one can significantly improve your database management processes by identifying duplicate records and linking related information across multiple datasets. This not only helps in maintaining data accuracy but also enhances the overall efficiency of your database systems. After all, databases contain massive volumes of data, and without proper management, you’ll end up sitting on piles of information that can take too much of your resources to explore and use.

The good news is, there are reliable ways to supercharge managing your databases, whether you use on-premise or cloud-based database management systems — and that’s what we’ll share in this guide. 

1. Invest in Database Management Planning

A long-term database management plan minimizes missing data errors and over or underutilizing tools and security blind spots in your database. 

After all, planning allows you to set the right policies, develop strategies, and decide on the right tools, such as choosing between ClickHouse vs. Snowflake, to manage your database seamlessly. 

Database management planning also helps you address common issues. 

For instance, information assets in insulated and separate systems with limited data access can make it hard to find data. 

Database management planning helps eliminate this since it allows you to identify the processes and systems currently housed in the silos. It lets you collect data about your primary systems, including those who use them to understand your datasets. 

Planning also helps you map out your multiple datasets located in many systems, allowing you to strategize how to leverage your database to combine all your data easily. 

Additionally, you can determine the best time to conduct audits, including performing routine checks on your data lifecycle quality, data flows, and database security.   

2. Establish Business Goals

An actionable database management strategy should reflect your company’s needs. It should also outline your target metrics to monitor your success.

Determine your business goals, including the data you want to collect and how you can use the data effectively to reach those objectives. 

Doing so helps you avoid wasting resources by gathering wrong or unnecessary data and missing critical data opportunities.  

Essentially, your goals can give you a roadmap to use your business data and help shape your database management strategies.  

Some of the common business data uses to help reach your goals include:

• Spotting patterns and trends. Sales and customer trends can give you actionable insights into your buyers’ purchasing behaviors and industry. For instance, if your goal is to increase your app downloads, you can track consumption trends and usage patterns to inform your marketing strategies. 

You can configure your database to pull this information from multiple sources automatically. It streamlines the reporting and analysis processes necessary to improve your marketing efforts. 

• Improving and automating processes. Your goals can give you a clear picture of critical workflows to refine, adjust, and automate, including your database management processes. 

3. Prioritize Security

While not every security event is 100% preventable or predictable, you can improve your data security and manage database risks. 

Establish recovery planning and run regular backup and maintenance to streamline your security-related database management processes. The strategies can help you protect from and mitigate security breaches, database compromise, and data loss.   

Some of the other ways to manage your database security more effectively are:

• Implementing backup and recovery procedures. Develop a backup and recovery plan and conduct thorough reviews to ensure it fits your team, security strategy, and database management processes. 

• Set up a comprehensive maintenance plan. Run regular database maintenance and prioritize data security, so you don’t end up playing catch up after a devastating security breach.

Create a plan your team can use as a preventative measure. It can help shape and guide your database management security processes. 

• Leverage automation. Use automation tools or features to support your database security measures. For example, you can schedule automated database backups, so you won’t need to do it manually.  

4. Reduce Data Duplication

Duplicate data can slow down your database’s performance and keep you from running efficient reporting and analysis. 

Duplicates also often lead to more work for your team and even waste your internal resources.

For example, if you have duplicate customer records in your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, your team can spend twice as much of their productive time fixing the problem. 

Some of the best ways to eliminate duplicates and optimize your database management workflows are to:

• Remove siloed data management and access. Duplication errors are likely to occur when individual departments manage separate areas of your database. Duplication can also happen when teams manage their own databases without direction or input from management.

Eliminate siloed data access and management to get rid of duplication and unnecessary work.  

• Share data quality essentials across teams. A team member who doesn’t know the implications of creating duplicate records can add to your entire company’s workload. 

As such, ensure everyone across your teams understands the basics of protecting your data quality and the impact of duplicate data. Include employees who don’t work directly with your database. 

• Develop a duplicate data plan and test your database. Create a plan to address the potential sources of your duplication errors to prevent them from happening repeatedly.

It’s also good practice to regularly test your database to ensure you’re implementing your fixes and addressing the duplication effectively. 

5. Ensure Easy User Access to Data

Make sure your designated users, such as your marketing and sales teams, can benefit from your data. You can do this by allowing end-users and internal (and other) stakeholders easy access to your database.

Set up a database access system and assign user roles. It can streamline managing your database since you can ensure that only people with the proper credentials can access specific aspects and information within your database.

Other useful tips to provide easy access to your database include:

• Designing and managing for the user. Consider the best ways your database is used and design it to accommodate those methods. Be mindful of your various users. 

For example, some development and management strategies or shortcuts might work best for your team but might not work well from a performance or usability perspective. 

• Get feedback on your database. Run surveys, hold committee meetings, or appoint a database administrator to gather input from various end-users to assess how your database is working for each one. 

Getting feedback helps you design and manage your database in a way that works well for you, your team, and all users. 

Start Optimizing Your Database Management 

Managing an easily accessible, well-performing database is critical to efficient reporting and analytics. 

It also helps you extract accurate, valuable insights seamlessly and find business opportunities to make informed decisions and accelerate company growth. 

Learn from the best practices in this guide to streamline, simplify, and optimize your database management processes.