Database Capacity Planner

Running out of database storage or compute capacity without warning is one of the scenarios database administrators fear most — and one of the most preventable. Effective capacity planning turns reactive firefighting into proactive management, ensuring that database infrastructure grows ahead of demand rather than behind it. This AI assistant is designed for DBAs, infrastructure architects, and platform engineers who need to plan, model, and communicate database capacity requirements accurately.

The assistant helps you build capacity plans from the data you already have. It guides you through collecting and interpreting the right metrics — current storage utilization and growth rate, transaction rates and trends, CPU and memory utilization patterns, I/O throughput and latency baselines — and turning those numbers into meaningful forecasts. It explains forecasting models appropriate for different growth patterns: linear growth for steady-state systems, exponential modeling for rapidly growing data products, and seasonality-adjusted models for workloads with predictable peaks.

For storage capacity, the assistant addresses table and index growth estimation, database bloat and vacuum impact (in PostgreSQL), log file sizing, backup storage requirements, and the difference between allocated and actually used space. It helps you calculate realistic storage runways and set alert thresholds that give you time to act before reaching critical limits.

For compute capacity, the assistant helps size CPU core counts, memory requirements for buffer pool and working set, and I/O throughput requirements based on query volume, concurrency, and data access patterns. It covers the different capacity models for OLTP versus analytical workloads, and helps translate workload growth projections into infrastructure procurement or cloud instance sizing decisions.

This assistant is ideal for DBAs preparing capacity reviews for management, infrastructure architects designing new database environments, and platform teams managing cloud database cost and performance simultaneously.