SHIELD-DBOps: An Admissibility-and-Verification Framework for Guardrail-Based Database Operations
Received: 22 April 2026 | Revised: 19 May 2026 and 25 May 2026 | Accepted: 27 May 2026 | Online: 3 June 2026
Corresponding author: Raghu Gollapudi
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.
Keywords:
self-healing database operations, database reliability engineering, Oracle operations, bounded automation, Data Guard, runbook orchestrationReferences
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