Reducing Database Footprint: The Fastest Path to Cost and Performance Gains

When a database becomes slow and expensive to run, solutions include expanding database infrastructure, increasing the instance size, or the number of replicas. However, these only affect database symptoms; they do not address the root cause of the growing database size. The footprint of a database is the total amount of data that's in use (including storage, indexing, replication, backup, and recovery), which often goes unmeasured. Organizations also retain information that has no operational value -old logs, records, and disused application data. Given that deleting data is often costly but storage is inexpensive, the cost of retaining data falls on storage, replication, backups, indexes, and disaster recovery. Reducing the size of the database has multiple benefits. As a side effect of the smaller database, databases are typically scanned more quickly, cached better, and disaster recovery is faster, among other advantages. For industries that have low profit margins, a smaller operational database can directly translate into greater profits. Information lifecycle management allows an organization to classify the data based on how frequently it is accessed and how important it is to the business, moving cold data to less-costly storage while stripping or using caching to increase the performance of business-critical data. Footprint reduction eliminates waste, making it more efficient than scaling. Intentional data residency strategies, such as data classification, archiving, and the expiration of ownerless data, can help with cost-effectiveness, performance, and resilience for organizations over time.