Database sprawl costs money and not just in software licenses. It costs money in maintenance and hardware, and also hits businesses indirectly by impacting the performance of other applications. Earlier this week, we posted four consolidation strategy tips.

Here are the remaining eWEEK consolidation strategy tips:

5) Test Applications Before Consolidation
"Many companies reported they ran into application- and data-related issues when they consolidated databases to a fewer number of servers, only to later realize that some clients could not connect without manual changes on their desktop, batch processes failed [and] application response time became worse than before. All applications should be tested, especially the critical ones to ensure that there is no impact on its functionality, performance, availability, integration and security," Forrester's Yuhanna said. "Do a parallel run with the new platform to ensure there are no unknown issues."

6) Remember Database Consolidation Is an Ongoing Process
Because it is driven by hardware refreshes and the evolving nature of businesses—which enter new markets and buy other companies—database consolidation is a continuous process, said Burton Group's Collins. "The supporting processes [e.g., application portfolio management and technology refresh] should be an integral part of the IT processes."

7) Understand the Database Landscape
Businesses should develop a comprehensive application portfolio that details the relationship between database, application and business processes and the service level required by businesses process; the relationship between database and the supporting hardware as well as internal database structures, version and feature usage. Businesses should also have current and historical workload and usage statistics and forward-looking, capacity-planning data, Collins said.

8) Keep Licensing in Mind Organizations should pay attention to special licensing terms with virtualized database servers. "We've seen many customers make mistakes in their licensing calculation for running Oracle on a virtual platform," said Pythian CTO Alex Gorbachev. "It often comes as a surprise that licensing rules make clients pay for the whole physical hardware rather than the small subset allocated to a virtual machine that is running database software. Know your platform and licensing schemes."