Significance of ITIL for DBA

What is ITIL? ITIL stands for Infrastructure Information Library.It is a standard from U.K government that has undergone various revisions.Latest Version is ITILv3. What is ITILv3 focussed on? ITIL in general deals with the processes related to service management.This includes issues related to incidents mangement,problem management,configuration management,change management,release management. What is incident management? Any unexpected event that has an impact on the existing system is an incident.This includes database shutdown due to various failures like media error,server failure.Processes needs to be formulated and followed to handle incidents.Incidents are unknown and hence proactive measures needs to be taken to prevent them and reactive actions should be taken to adress them. What is problem management? Problem is an recurring issue.It is mandatory to analyse the root cause of an issue and come out with a permanent solution.Database,Server,Application logs can be used for this purpose.A good example is Load in database that needs to be tuned,deadlock issue etc. What is configuration Management? Any chnages made to the system configuration.This can be changes to server,database,application. What is change management? Whenever an incident occurs it is mandatory to raise a ticket and depending on the severity it could be given severity(priority) say SEV1 etc. What is release management? It is mandatory to document the patch level,software version level of infrastructure components including servers,databases.This document needs to be available to everyone for quick reference.So whenever a change happens it has to be documented. Why does a DBa need ITIL? Around 40% of billion dollar software companies have started adopting ITIL.This is a standard that integrates business with infrastructure.It has resulted in increased customer satisfaction. DBA's have data which is the sole property(heart) of an organization.So it is mandatory for them to follow the processes and document their activites for the system to be up and running on a 24X7 basis and address issues if one happens Automatic Diagnostic Repository ITIL compliance: From oracle database 11g onwards database is in compliance with the Infrastructure Information Library (ITIL) standard.ITIL emphasizes on service management and concentrates on core areas including incident management,problem management,change management,configuration management,release management. Oracle database 11g has a fault diagnosibility infrastructure inbuilt in it which is used to capture the incidents and store them in a file-based hierarchial repository outside the database.The repository is called as automatic diagnostic repository(ADR) and is used to trace network wide issues.Oracle documentation available  here says the goals achieved out of fault diagnostic infrastructure: First-failure diagnosis Problem prevention Limiting damage and interruptions after a problem is detected Reducing problem diagnostic time Reducing problem resolution time Simplifying customer interaction with Oracle Support When we map the goals entioned above to ITIL standard we find that,first-failure diagnosis - incident management problem prevention - problem management limiting damage and interruptions after a problem is detected - problem management reducing problem diagnostic time - problem management which demands pro-active approach reduce problem resolution time - problem management simplifying customer interaction with oracle support - Basic ITIL goal Service management that focusses on customers