Line of business applications used by sales, marketing, manufacturing operations, finance, human resources and other departments provide facilities for entering and retrieving business-critical data. The important jobs of centralizing, managing, protecting, and storing data are left to the underlying database management system (DBMS). A basis for all business decision making, the data that resides in a DBMS must be available and protected and performance must support, rather than impede, the pace of business. And, since data stores only grow, the DBMS has to scale to accommodate new users and new information.

Reliability and availability, data protection, performance, and scalability are all essential characteristics of a DBMS. This paper looks at each one of those characteristics in detail and offers an implementation guide for SMBs that require a highly reliable database environment.