Specialists in Human Resources and Payroll Solutions

The Database Server provides the storage for application and configuration data.

Jane HR Systems are supported on two database platforms: Oracle and SQL Server. The Database Server is operating system independent and can run on any industry supported UNIX variant and the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Although in a production environment there will typically be one Database Server, there is a growing trend to move to data replication services to aid with scalability and provide an additional level of system security.

By default, our installation process of the Database Server will include three environments: a production environment; a training environment; and a test environment. These three environments will usually reside on the same hardware environment, however it is becoming more common that a second hardware environment is established to host training and test environments – albeit with a dual purpose of providing a level of business continuity in the case of main server failure.

The production environment contains all of the live data of the business. The protection of this environment is critical to the business. Effective data security procedures need to be implemented to ensure business continuity due to failure of this environment. Data security includes performing regular backups of the data. Both Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases provide on-line backups – meaning that the system can continue to serve users whilst the data is being stored to backup storage. Alternative methods for backup include cold or off-line backups, and this is where the database is taken off-line – meaning that no users can access the system whilst the backup is being performed.

The training environment is used for staff training and education purposes. Once established, the environment can be 'resynced' with data from the production environment. This is a low cost method of ensuring that staff are working with familiar data sets and that procedural system changes are effectively implemented.

The test environment is used for testing upgrades, either application software upgrades, or in the case where a second hardware environment has been established, hardware, operating system, and database upgrades.

The following represents a typical SQL Server (Microsoft) implementation:

The sizing of the database is dependent on a number of factors that relate to the number of modules deployed, the number of registered users on the system, and the amount of history requiring to be maintained online.

There are other factors that mainly affect the size of the database which are application specific including the number of employees and the number of facilities used. Experience with our customer base indicates that typically the size of database is expected to grow to between 4 - 10 GBytes with 4 – 5 years of online history.

To achieve the best performance, database vendors recommend spreading the database across as many disk spindles as possible, and this has implications for the physical size of your server.