The Role of the Application Managers and Developers

In Part 1 of this series I addressed the role of the Director of Data Management and/or the Director of BI/Data Warehousing and the key information needed to achieve their objects and goals in managing the IT team responsible for the integrated delivery of the data warehouse.

This installment I will address role of the Application Managers and Developers and what is needed by them to efficiently manage the BI users and applications deployed.

The BI Application managers and developers are responsible for the application infrastructure and the management of the business users. The key functions include:

• Responds to the business user requirements and develops applications (reports and analysis) to meet business needs.

• Develop and manage the complete lifecycle of the BI Applications

• Collaborate with the data architects, data warehouse developers and database administrators to Ensure the performance of the applications and effectively address end-user complaints

The user activity in a BI and data warehouse environment is characterized by unpredictability and constant change. As deployments get larger, the user’s typically are allowed to develop and run reports in an ad-hoc manner (as opposed to pre-tested and canned applications).

The key goals for the Application managers and developers in managing the BI and data warehouse deployments typically are:

• Respond faster to end-user complaints

• Improve BI application performance

• Ensure that the applications and access provided meet audit requirements for security or regulatory requirements

To effectively meet these goals, the BI Application Managers need the ability to clearly understand how their end-user activity is impacting the applications that are deployed. Rather than chasing one or two problematic SQL queries the application managers would be far better served at first analyzing the most frequent user activity that impact performance and then isolate the sources of issues. In addition, Application managers need end-to-end view that correlates the users and application activity with data usage and database query performance metrics in order to diagnose problems and respond faster.

Examples of information needed by the Application managers and developers are:

• Who are the most frequent users running problematic queries - i.e. User = Application User_ID (not generic database ID)

• Who are the Users running Ad-hoc reports  and creating very expensive query activity or poorly written queries? E.g. Unconstrained queries that return 1000s of rows unnecessarily

• What are the most frequent or repetitive queries that are long running? Who are the Application users? What data is involved? What other operations are occurring on the data that contributes to issues?

• Who is using sensitive data, when and how? E.g. Which user queried the table “Credit_card ID” and returned more than 100,000 rows?

It is clear from the above examples that to manage BI users and applications requires more than just the application server level metrics. Instead it requires visibility to applications user activity that is correlated with data usage and database performance metrics.

In my next blog I will discuss the role of the Application Database Administrators and Data Warehouse Architects.