SHIELD-DBOps: An Admissibility-and-Verification Framework for Guardrail-Based Database Operations
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Enterprise production databases emit abundant telemetry, yet recurring database incidents are still often handled through disconnected alerts, scripts, Oracle-native point tools, and manual runbooks. The unresolved operational problem is not detection alone; it is the gap between detection and verified closure. In always-on financial and enterprise data environments, this gap is now operationally expensive because teams must control mixed Real Application Clusters (RAC), standby, and non-production estates under uptime, auditability, and staffing pressure. This paper presents SHIELD-DBOps (Standardized Handling of Incidents with Escalation Limits and Decision-guardrails), an external orchestration framework that standardizes four recurring incident classes through one supervisory control contract: TEMP/UNDO pressure, archive/FRA saturation, blocking sessions, and Data Guard apply lag. The technical contribution is a reusable admission-action-verification-handoff contract that separates database-operations policy from execution mechanics. Operational validation is reported on an 11-month ServiceNow incident series with class-level monthly counts and Mean Time To Resolve (MTTR). After production enablement in mid-May 2025, class-level MTTR remained below that of the transition month across all four classes, and incident counts declined overall. The results are descriptive and deployment-specific; phased rollout, mid-series policy tuning, and the absence of a control group preclude causal claims.
DOI: 10.48084/etasr.19469
Author: Raghu Gollapudi
Institution: Fiserv (United States)
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Networks and Communications
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $431
OpenAlex ID: W7202269232