As the second largest police force in the UK, West Midlands Police covers an area of 348 square miles and serves a population of almost 2.63 million. The force’s Database Administrator (DBA) team faces an ever-increasing volume of data that impacts the performance of its critical end-user systems. In order to keep up with its data growth, West Midlands Police turned to Quest Software for help with performance management.
The Challenge
West Midlands Police has more than 90 databases, mostly Oracle-driven, with a handful based on SQL Server. With the exception of command and control – the system used when an emergency call is made – these databases hold virtually all data produced by the force. This includes details about crimes, intelligence and custody as well as finance, HR and payroll information.
Each day, as many as 1,500 records in the West Midlands area are entered into the force’s databases. Information about a minor crime such as a mobile phone robbery would require a small amount of disk space. However, a more serious crime, such as a murder, would require more disk space. Because of the varying amount of input to the databases, capacity planning was difficult for the force’s DBA team. Maintaining reasonable performance levels became problematic.
As the database volumes grew, capacity checks became a major responsibility for the DBA team, with each of the three members spending at least five hours per week on it. To ensure users would not be affected by volume growth or any dips in performance, the DBA team needed a solution to help them proactively manage its databases and systems. The solution would also have to provide automatic capacity checking, to save them time.
The Quest Solution
West Midlands Police previously leveraged Quest Software to improve the performance of the national HOLMES system, using what is now Quest Central for Oracle. The HOLMES system collates records of large-scale crimes requiring the resources of more than one police force. The force had been very impressed with Quest Central’s strong application tuning capabilities, and determined that another solution from the company could meet its needs.
“We tested Quest’s Spotlight® and Foglight® solutions, and it quickly became obvious that they would meet all our requirements,” explained Bob Wellings, senior database administrator, West Midlands Police. “The central console would provide us with full visibility of all our databases on one screen, saving us huge amounts of time.”
As a result, the force purchased both solutions for Oracle, UNIX and Windows environments. Spotlight allows administrators to anticipate and correct database and system performance issues. It identifies and diagnoses thousands of performance issues at the exact source, sets thresholds to trigger alerts, and displays the alerts when any bottlenecks are detected.
Foglight monitors each component of the technology stack in real time, detecting potential problems and alerting application managers before performance suffers. It also highlights trends, enabling organisations to fine-tune applications and better accommodate peak periods of system activity.
The Bottom Line
The Quest solution provides West Midland Police with e-mail alerts, allowing it to proactively manage performance. “Foglight and Spotlight enable us to plan more effectively, and as a result the amount of time each of us spends on support has decreased,” noted Wellings. “This gives us time to further improve the service we provide in other areas.”
The DBA team now feels more in control of its environment. “Now we can rely on Spotlight and Foglight to tell us about any issues before our users are affected,” explained Wellings. West Midlands Police is impressed by the ease of use and intuitive interfaces of Quest’s solutions.
This saves the team valuable time. “Spotlight offers suggestions on how to tune performance as well as a useful introduction to new features in Oracle, Unix or Windows,” added Wellings.
