Configuration

Careful configuration of databases that lie in the VLDB realm is necessary to alleviate or reduce issues raised by VLDB databases.^{[11]: 36–53 [12]}

Administration

The complexities of managing a VLDB can increase exponentially for the database administrator as database size increases.^[13]

Availability and maintenance

When dealing with VLDB operations relating to maintenance and recovery such as database reorganizations and file copies which were quite practical on a non-VLDB take very significant amounts of time and resources for a VLDB database.^[14] In particular it typically infeasible to meet a typical recovery time objective (RTO), the maximum expected time a database is expected to be unavailable due to interruption, by methods which involve copying files from disk or other storage archives.^[13] To overcome these issues techniques such as clustering, cloned/replicated/standby databases, file-snapshots, storage snapshots or a backup manager may help achieve the RTO and availability, although individual methods may have limitations, caveats, license, and infrastructure requirements while some may risk data loss and not meet the recovery point objective (RPO).^{[15][16][13][17][18]} For many systems only geographically remote solutions may be acceptable.^[19]

Performance

Given the same infrastructure there may typically be a decrease in performance, that is increase in response time as database size increases. Some accesses will simply have more data to process (scan) which will take proportionally longer (linear time); while the indexes used to access data may grow slightly in height requiring perhaps an extra storage access to reach the data (sub-linear time).^[22] Other effects can be caching becoming less efficient because proportionally less data can be cached and while some indexes such as the B+ automatically sustain well with growth others such as a hash table may need to be rebuilt.

Should an increase in database size cause the number of accessors of the database to increase then more server and network resources may be consumed, and the risk of contention will increase. Some solutions to regaining performance include partitioning, clustering, possibly with sharding, or use of a database machine.^{[23]: 390 [24]}

Storage

In order to satisfy needs of a VLDB the database storage needs to have low access latency and contention, high throughput, and high availability.

Server resources

The increasing size of a VLDB may put pressure on server and network resources and a bottleneck may appear that may require infrastructure investment to resolve.^[13][28]