Datasouth

Database management systems

Datasouth installs, configures and manages a large number of database management systems for our clients. For this purpose Datasouth specialises in the use of Microsoft SQL server providing for the organisation, storage, management, and retrieval of data in a database.

Microsoft SQL Server’s Open Database Connectivity makes SQL independent of programming languages, database systems and operating systems. SQL Server also supports the ability to deliver client connectivity using Web Services protocol allowing non-Windows users to communicate cross platform with SQL Server.

Our engineers knowledge of SQL Server provide clients with the capability to distribute workloads amongst multiple servers. Failover clustering can also be provided, in which the workload of a server is transferred to another system in the event of a system failure.

Datasouth engineers will also set up database mirroring, allowing for the creation of replica database content. Using SQL Server’s capability we also provide for the creation of “snapshots”, backups of data that can be reverted back to when required.

Data Warehousing

Datasouth’s proven data warehouse solutions use the latest technologies to set up repositories of data.

Our data warehousing solutions enhance end-user access to a wide variety of data and provide users with easy access to specified trend reports, e.g. the branch with the most sales in a particular product area within the last three years. Data Warehouses can be a significant enabler of commercial business applications, particularly customer relationship management systems.

We understand that a data warehouse is an organisations corporate memory. Datasouth’s developers and database administrators are able to perform complex queries and analysis on data warehouses without slowing down our clients’ operational systems.

Our developers frequently discover that data in data warehouses is heavily summarised or stored in a dimension based model. To achieve acceptable query response times our data warehouses are optimised for reporting and analysis using online analytical processing.

Data Mining and Analysis

We can help your organisation find, summarise and extract useful information that can be used by business decision makers to make important business critical decisions.

Datasouth has the expertise to sort through vast amounts of data in order to select relevant information. Our Business Intelligence capabilities enable our developers to extract and organise information from the large sets of data to provide extremely useful financial, sales and marketing information for our clients.

Database Administration

Datasouth has a great deal of experience administering databases. Datasouth will provide clients with backup capability, database performance tuning and analysis.

Datasouth database administration covers

• Installation of new software
• Configuration of hardware and software with the system administrator
• Database Management System Security administration - adding and removing users, administering quotas, auditing, and checking for security problems
• Data analysis — Datasouth will analyse the data stored in the client’s database and make recommendations relating to performance and efficiency of that data storage
• Database design
• Data modelling and optimisation

Data Movement

Datasouth is expert at using SQLs enhanced capabilities of Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) in data warehousing to extract data from outside sources. Datasouth developers then transform this information to fit business needs and ultimately load it into the end target, i.e. the data warehouse. Datasouth is also experienced at using ETL for integration with legacy systems.

Data Quality Assurance

Datasouth carries out data profiling to discover inconsistencies, and other anomalies in the data and will then “clean” the data to improve the data quality. Datasouth developers detect and correct corrupt or inaccurate records from a record set.

After cleansing, a data set will be consistent with other similar data sets in the system. The inconsistencies detected or removed may have been caused by user entry errors, or may have been corrupted in transmission or storage. Datasouth’s data quality assurance methodology ensures that our clients’ data is unambiguous, correct, and complete.

Data Security

Our solutions ensure that data is kept safe from corruption and that access to it is controlled.

Datasouth provides many layers and types of information security including:

• Auditing
• Integrity controls
• Access Control
• User Authentication
• Encryption

Datasouth evaluates our clients' database security by performing vulnerability assessments against client database, attempting to find holes that could be used to break into the database. We perform vulnerability scans on databases which in turn enables our developers to mitigate the threat of intrusion into valuable client information.

Our engineers carry out a sequence of patch management and review and manage the user permissions granted to areas within the database.

Datasouth provides authentication and authorisation at the application level which allows users to have a single sign on capability across multiple databases and database platforms.

Datasouth uses Microsoft SQL Server tools for real-time monitoring of database protocol traffic over the network. Analysis can be performed on the traffic for known exploits or network traffic baselines can be captured over time to build a normal pattern used for detection of anomalous activity that could be indicative of intrusion. These systems can provide a comprehensive trail in addition to the intrusion detection mechanisms.
learn more about Datasouth SQL Server »