Organisations struggle to manage databases following COVID-19 digitisation

There has been a spike in data demands in recent months, despite many aspects of life and work being impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, many organisations are encountering difficulties with their database.

This is the key finding of a new SingleStore survey.

The vast majority (85.5%) of the survey group said that they have seen an increase in data demands since the start of the pandemic.

However, many said that their existing database or databases are not up to the task of handling the pandemic eras volume and velocity of data.

In fact, 43.8% of the IT professionals responding to the SingleStore survey said that they have experienced three to four database-related bottlenecks since the start of the pandemic, and more than a fifth said they have faced six to seven bottlenecks amid COVID-19.

This may help explain why 72% of IT professionals who responded to the SingleStore survey said that they have considered changing their database services in the past year, the researchers state.

SingleStore CEO Raj Verma "The pandemic sent data volume and velocity which were already on a rapid rise into the stratosphere.

"The existing data platforms that many organisations use today are struggling to keep up. That is creating climbing concurrency demands; rising costs and complexity; sluggish event-to-insight response; and unmet service level agreements.

SingleStore research indicates that cloud migration is the leading reason that organisations are looking to embrace a new database and leave added cost and complexity behind.

More than half (51.8%) of those surveyed said cloud migration is driving them to consider modernisation. Nearly half (46.4%) said they want to adopt a new database because their current solution is too expensive.

Almost as many (41.3%) said their current solution doesnt meet new workload demands. More than a third (38.3%) said that their existing database has reached end of life.

Some IT professionals are considering modernising their data platform to address todays requirements and prepare them for success in the future. However, many actually expect to make such changes in the coming months.

More than a third (36.7%) of IT professionals said they plan to replace their current data solutions in the next three to six months. An even greater share (37.1%) said they will implement a modern data platform in the next six months to a year.

Verma says, "The pandemic expedited digital transformation, distilling the digitisation that would have normally taken two to three years down to just six months.

"Organisations ability to adjust and adapt at this speed was nothing short of amazing. But now that the dust has settled, many companies are left grappling with data platforms that can't easily handle all of their diverse data types and workloads, scale economically, or address the growing cloud complexity.

Verma "The conventional wisdom in recent years has been to use a specialised datastore per workload. This is a relic of the previous era of cloud data management.

"It isn't effective for achieving the real-time analytics experience that is essential in modern applications and winning SaaS products.

"Analytics provide a clear direction on the steps that organisations can take to keep customers and employees happy, and even save lives. Yet many organisations forego analytics in exchange for better database performance.

He continues, "Interest in the upcoming Couchbase IPO and recent Snowflake public offering highlight that todays modern, data-driven enterprises want and need help managing data. But in some ways, the solutions from such companies are echoes of the past.

"What's needed now is a unified approach that leverages SQL, brings together real-time streaming data and analytics on multi-model data, and supports an agile, flexible cloud deployment model.

The research is based on a 500-person survey of IT professionals that Propeller Insights conducted in January 2021 on behalf of SingleStore.