A Taxonomy of Metrics for Hosted Databases

The past three years has seen exponential growth in the number of organizations who have elected to entrust core information technology functions to application service providers. Of particular interest is the outsourcing of critical systems such as corporate databases. Major banks and financial service firms are contracting with third party organizations, sometimes overseas, for their database needs. These sophisticated contracts require careful supervision by both parties. Due to the complexities of web- based applications and the complicated nature of databases, an entire class of software suites has been developed to measure the quality of service the database is providing. This article investigates the performance metrics which have evolved to satisfy this need and describes a taxonomy of performance metrics for hosted databases.