“We need to save money.” One of the phrases that is both common and worrying for IT managers and CIOs. And this comes with an extra challenge. Not only do you have to cut costs, you’ll have to do so without an impact on performance. Slow is the new downtime, after all. 

So, where do you start? We’ve found that databases often hold significant (and surprisingly overlooked) opportunities for optimisation. You can grow your business with fewer resources, but it requires a smart, strategic approach, not just blind budget cuts. 

In this guide, we’ll walk you through four steps for finding and eliminating unnecessary database costs, without ever compromising on performance. 

Step 1: Check what you’re spending money on 

Before you can optimise anything, you need to know exactly what you have. So, the first step is always to create a thorough inventory of all the systems and databases currently running in your environment. 

Once you have that list, you can start asking the tough questions: 

• Are all these environments still necessary? We often find applications that were decommissioned years ago, but their databases are still running. 

• What about temporary project environments? A project might have needed four development environments, but what if they are still there two years later? 

These forgotten resources are perfect candidates for decommissioning. It’s the easiest low-hanging fruit for immediate cost savings. 

Step 2: Review your licenses (carefully!) 

After you’ve cleaned up your inventory, it’s time to look at your licenses. Are you paying for more than you actually need? Sometimes the answer is yes, but you have to be careful here. 

Downgrading a license can seem like a quick win, but it can have hidden consequences. For example, migrating from an Oracle Database Enterprise Edition to a Standard Edition will certainly lower your bill. But you’ll also lose access to critical features like online index rebuild, which could lead to more downtime during maintenance. 

So, always think through the full impact of a license change. It’s a powerful way to save money, but only if it doesn’t take away a feature your business truly relies on. 

Step 3: Analyse your infrastructure resources 

Next, look at the underlying infrastructure. Are your databases using the right amount of CPU, memory, and storage? The only way to answer this is with good monitoring. 

Your monitoring data will tell you the real story. For instance, you might discover a system that never uses more than 5% of its allocated CPU. That’s a perfect opportunity to downsize the resources and reduce costs without any impact on performance. You can’t optimise what you can’t measure, so make sure your monitoring is up to scratch. 

Step 4: Tune your application performance 

Finally, evaluate how your applications are using the database. A poorly written query can consume an enormous amount of resources, driving up costs and slowing everything down. 

Using a good performance tuning tool can help you identify these slow, resource-hungry queries. A great, low-threshold place to start is with a tool like DBmarlin. It’s designed by and for DBAs, allowing you to monitor performance across different database types and find those optimisation opportunities. 

How we can help 

We like to help our clients find smart ways to save on database costs, both for new and existing environment. 

For new environments, we help you think through your platform choices from the start. We make sure you build a future-proof architecture that meets your budget and your business goals. 

For existing environments, we dive into your current setup to find optimisation opportunities. We’ll help you improve performance (sometimes with fewer resources!) by consolidating servers, right-sizing licenses, or even migrating to the cloud. 

So, no matter the context, we will (almost) always find some way to optimise your environment and save you money. Want to see it for yourself? Get in touch and let’s have a chat.