By Steve Tuohy

In data management, understanding the total cost of owning and maintaining a database is essential for any business. While the initial software license costs might seem straightforward, organizations must be aware of several other expenses that can quickly escalate as data grows, impacting the bottom line and hindering the ability to stay competitive.

In today's fast-paced business landscape, real-time data and rapid decision-making are crucial for success. Selecting the right operational database deserves careful consideration. The choice impacts the ability to serve customers and innovate. It can also affect long-term organizational costs. However, many businesses fail to notice the hidden costs that lurk beneath the surface. Identifying them can help avoid potential pitfalls and optimize database expenditure.

Here are five often-overlooked areas that contribute significantly to the total cost of database ownership. By recognizing and evaluating these hidden costs, organizations can make well-informed decisions to optimize their database infrastructure and choose the most cost-effective solution for their unique needs. With a clear understanding of the total cost of ownership, they can leverage the power of real-time data while maintaining a competitive edge in the market.

1: Growing Database License Costs

Before digging into some of the more masked expenses, the most basic sign of cost escalation is the bill from the database vendor. While starting with an inexpensive database seems sensible, many databases lack scalability and incur disproportionate costs as data volume increases. For example, scaling RAM does not typically translate to proportional performance improvement with in-memory databases. Alternatively, a database designed for scale experiences hardly any decrease in performance as the workload increases.

Organizations might also discover that their overall database license costs have grown over time as they have amassed multiple databases for various purposes, such as key-value, document use cases, cache, source of truth, etc. To address this, organizations should consider opting for a multi-model database that can handle a mix of uses cases, avoiding the need for multiple databases and complex licensing fees.

2: Concealed Infrastructure Costs

While software license costs are the most visible, hardware and infrastructure are often much larger database expenses. Open source software may seem cost-effective but often requires substantial infrastructure investments. Whether an organization manages data centers or uses cloud services, its database infrastructure needs and costs can vary greatly. Even databases with matching performance and pricing may differ significantly in server, storage, and networking requirements.

Also, many database vendors use node-based pricing, causing software license fees to rise alongside hardware costs. This situation encourages vendors to burden customers with an unnecessary amount of low-density servers based on inefficient in-memory architectures. To compound the issue, these in-memory strategies also necessitate more data copies (i.e., increased replication factors), leading to even greater infrastructure demands. Organizations should look at databases that price by the data volumes under management to mitigate this problem.

3: Payroll Expenses for Database Management

Beyond direct licensing and infrastructure costs, database management involves significant personnel expenses. Setting up, managing, upgrading, and troubleshooting databases requires a team of skilled professionals, which can strain budgets. While some databases might be manageable initially, they can become complex and resource-intensive as the deployment grows. Opting for a database that scales seamlessly can reduce the need for constant maintenance and support, freeing up staff to focus on more strategic tasks.

4: Opportunity Cost of Downtime

The impact of downtime on a business can be far-reaching and costly. If a database experiences regular outages, it may compromise an organization's ability to serve customers, conduct transactions, or deliver real-time services. The opportunity cost of downtime can be enormous, leading to lost revenue, decreased customer satisfaction, and damaged brand reputation. To avoid this hidden cost, it is vital to evaluate a database's track record of uptime at scale.

5: Ability to Compete in the Marketplace

In today's competitive economy, being a fraction of a second slower than your competitors can impact revenue. A database that can deliver lightning-fast responses with high throughput can unlock new revenue streams and enable product innovation. Organizations need to ensure that their chosen database has the capabilities needed to outperform competitors, as a lackluster database may hinder business growth and customer satisfaction.

Choosing the Best Database for Business

While assessing database options, it is crucial to balance benefits and costs. Solely focusing on cost might lead to less-than-optimal decisions. Instead, take a comprehensive approach by assessing the true cost of a database, factoring in scalability, performance, uptime, and customer experience. Recognizing these hidden costs is essential in making informed decisions for your business's database requirements. Ultimately, the ideal database solution should provide tangible value to your customers both now and in the future, all while minimizing the overall total cost of ownership.

##

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Steve Tuohy is director of product marketing at Aerospike. He has extensive experience in the enterprise software market, and data management in particular. Prior to Aerospike, he helped build marketing teams and growth at large companies like Cisco, late-stage and IPO companies like Cloudera and Alation, and early-stage companies Bigstream and Etleap. Steve has an MBA from Chicago Booth and studied economics and political science at the University of Michigan.