Maintaining Your Databases
Databases are critical IT components for any business, so it is crucial that the health and the performance of the databases are monitored and maintained for optimal performance. Whether the database is large, small, on-premise or cloud-based, all have the potential to fail.
Database failure can be caused by transactional errors, system crashes, no-memory errors, or no-disk space errors. Sometimes they just can’t cope with growing demand and fail slowly over a period of time. Database failures can result in: data loss, loss of productivity, other systems negatively affected, and dwindling user experience if the systems fail over time
No one can promise 100% uptime, but there are things that can be done. Best practices include:
- Regular and consistent backups and archive
- Test backups
- Practice strategies by introducing controlled failures
- Alerting
The problem is that many IT departments are short staffed, and maintenance gets sidelined—something to be handled after all the daily issues are averted. Keeping up with the latest database technologies and data management best practices can be even more challenging if you don’t have the expertise in-house.
In order to get the best database performance and limit costs, your organization should have the following database support tasks in place:
Schedule Maintenance – To ensure minimum impact to your business, a DBA should have regularly schedule maintenance windows to complete a performance review, install any updates, and find any potential issues.
Health Checks – Ensure that your database environment is performing optimally. Regularly conduct health checks to assess backups strategy, index maintenance, DB integrity, log and trace files, security, versioning and specs, disk latency, current/projected business needs, and more.
Performance Tuning – Monitoring your databases with a proactive model allows you to analyze patterns and take remedial actions before they become incidents. Making adjustments ahead of time will prevent you from having larger issues when something breaks.
On-Demand Support – There are situations that require flexible support on-demand without incurring ongoing expense. You need someone who can quickly identify the root cause and remediate your database problems.
If your organization does not have the skills or the staff to implement these recommendations, insights to the health of your databases, or has no recovery model, you should consider obtaining Virtual DBA services.
Contact us to learn how you can work with a ZAG Technology Strategist to leverage Virtual DBA and other database services while implementing a long-term IT strategy for your business.
