The Greatest Database Risk

The Greatest Database Risk

By Craig S. Mullins

Most organizations think their greatest database risk is downtime. It isn’t. It’s the slow, quiet loss of institutional knowledge.

For decades, enterprise systems—especially those running on Db2 for z/OS—have benefited from something rarely documented and often taken for granted: experience. Not just technical skill, but accumulated understanding. The kind that tells you why something was designed a certain way, not just how it works.

And that knowledge is disappearing.

A large portion of mainframe professionals are nearing retirement within 5–10 years. Senior DBAs retire. Architects move on. Teams shrink or shift focus. For example, one Db2 organization went from 15 DBAs down to 5 in just a few years while tasked with supporting the same number of applications.

What remains is a system that still runs… but is no longer fully understood.

Because even when headcount is “replaced,” knowledge isn’t. The traditional DBA role is being fragmented across developers, sysprogs, and tools. In addition, some responsibilities are partially automated, some are being partially ignored, and even more are partially misunderstood. The result is that no single person understands the entire Db2 environment anymore. Institutional knowledge becomes distributed, and therefore fragile.

At first, nothing breaks. In fact, everything may appear stable. Performance is acceptable. Jobs complete. SLAs are met. But under the surface, risk is growing. Because the most important aspects of database management were never fully captured in documentation:

• Why a specific index was created (and why three others were rejected)
• How access paths behave under different workload conditions
• Which recovery procedures work in theory versus in practice
• What historical compromises were made to meet business demands

Traditional documentation doesn’t solve this. It captures steps, not judgment. Procedures, not intuition. And certainly not the countless edge cases that experienced professionals navigate every day.

So, what can be done?

First, we need to acknowledge that “stable” does not mean “safe.” A system that runs without issues—but without understanding—is fragile by definition.

Second, we need to rethink how knowledge is captured and shared. Static documents and aging runbooks are not enough. Organizations should be looking at ways to embed operational intelligence directly into their tools and processes—capturing patterns, surfacing insights, and making expertise accessible to the next generation of DBAs.

This is where modern tooling and automation can play a critical role. Solutions from companies like Infotel Software are not just about performance tuning or monitoring—they’re about making database environments more understandable, more transparent, and ultimately more sustainable. They help externalize expertise in ways that teams can actually use. For example:

• High performance solutions to more efficiently unload data from Db2 tables thereby reducing CPU consumption and I/O operations as organizations move data to other Db2 tables, data warehouses, data lakes, and for ingestion, into AI models.
• Automated Db2 maintenance to optimize your Db2 administrative tasks with machine learning including backups, updating statistics, and reorganizing tables and indexes.
• SQL performance analysis tools can highlight inefficient SQL and explain access path behavior, giving less experienced DBAs visibility into decisions that previously required years of experience to understand.
• Automated tuning recommendations can surface index and query changes based on observed workload patterns—essentially capturing and applying best practices continuously.
• Built-in reporting and dashboards can document trends and decisions over time, turning day-to-day operations into a living knowledge base rather than a series of isolated actions.

Finally, we need to invest in people—not just hiring, but mentoring, cross-training, and creating opportunities for knowledge transfer before it’s too late.

Because the greatest risk to your database environment is not an outage. It’s the moment when no one remembers why it works. And what to do when it doesn’t!

Do you have a project in mind? Our experts are here to help. Click below to contact us.