Obamacare and the Health of YOUR Database

Replace excuses with solutions by instantly identifying database problems using pureFeat™.

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Obamacare. Few words are as polarizing in our society. But whatever you think about it, I think you would agree with me that: There is no question that it puts an exclamation on this uber-important business principle: “if your database is sick, your organization is unhealthy, your customers are unhappy, and your reputation suffers.” At launch in October 2013, the database at the heart of Obamacare must have been very, very sick.

In the early days of the initial rollout, Jeff Clark identified five lessons to be learned:

1. Your project stands a good chance of going over budget or past schedule.
2. If you don’t know what you want, you won’t get it.
3. Your project’s success ultimately depends on how you serve your customers.
4. The more valuable data you pack into one place, the bigger a target you’ll become.
5. Excuses make the problems worse.

I want to hone in on points three and five.

You could argue that the Obamacare website had two customers: individuals seeking insurance, and insurance companies receiving the data for new customers. As it relates to the individuals seeking insurance, what they wanted was a fast, frictionless way to get good information, and buy the best insurance possible. When a application can’t provide this quickly, it’s usually because of

• Hot spots: key information in the database that has to be read over and over again.
• Pain points: the highest-cost commands that drive the reading of the key information.
• Troublemakers: key information that requires the most writing on the part of the database
• Double trouble: data that needs to be reorganized because it is being modified and accessed so frequently.

Many organizations have a large staff devoted to playing cat and mouse with these, but our patented, award-winning pureFeat™ performance tools for IBM DB2 LUW databases allow our customers to rapidly isolate what costs the most and what hurts the most, empowering them to rapidly implement solutions, problem by problem, and serve their customers the way they deserve. That’s why a who’s who of industry leaders in business, accounting, hospitality, insurance, entertainment, retail, and federal and state governments rely on our software to optimize the performance of their databases.

As the saying goes, “You can have results, or you can have excuses - but you can’t have both.” But underneath all of that, in the world of business as well as the world of databases, is the data. And the data will tell you how to fix the database problem if you’ll let it.

One of the reasons our pureFeat software is so popular is because it instantly identifies the database problems, and often allows our clients to solve them in a single click. But the other benefit is that it allows the IT team to accurately describe to leadership the exact problem, the exact impact, and the exact benefit the fix will create. This replaces excuses with solutions.

What You Must Know
Your Project’s Success Ultimately Depends on How You Serve Your Customers

Free White Paper “Open in Case of Emergency:  The C-level Emergency Guide to Database Problems.” Learn how to: Control spiraling costs in an emergency. Solve business-threatening problems instantly. Cut through the fog when no one knows what to do. Download Now.

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