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Services : Database Design, Technologies, Support, ETL, Monitoring, Performance Tuning, Warehousing
For many companies, the mark of what determines success is not how they do business on the average day, but how they handle diversity. Databases often contain expensive or even critical information for a company. The loss of this data for some companies could result in exorbitant expenses to replace it. Some companies may find themselves unable to even do business without it. Some companies, like banks, if they lose their records are more than just out of business, but under threat of multiple law suits. A decent disaster recovery plan ensures that your data can be restored regardless of how it was lost. A good plan does it quickly to minimize down time and embarrassment. A great plan ensures that the disaster never occurs in the first place. There are 3 areas of disaster recovery to consider Some of the techniques we use to protect your data are below.
P R E V E N T I O NA number of measures can be taken to reduce the likelihood you will encounter a server outage. After all, the best plan is the one which prevents the disaster from ever occurring. User Error Limited permissions of certain databases, tables, or even columns to the necessary personnel protects against more than just sabotage. Limiting an employee’s ability to alter data protects against accidents as well. Creating an application for the user to interface with can provide more sophisticated permissions. You can determine not only which data can be changed but how. Interfaces can also help guide users to correct choices and warn them of dangerous ones. A good application will even improve employee performance. Hardware Failure Anything mechanical will eventually break. By the strategic use of redundant hardware, we can ensure that damaged hardware will not cause a loss of data. Through the use of RAID hard drive configurations and similar technologies, we can keep your database moving like nothing ever happened. Physical Security Believe it or not, one of the most common causes of servers being unexpectedly restarted is them getting accidentally unplugged. Effective physical security measures, starting with locked doors, can reduce your chances of unnecessary personnel damaging or restarting a server.
P R O T E C T I O NThe fundamental part of any disaster recovery plan is to ensure that you do not lose data. For many companies, if the data can at least be recovered, everything else seems small in comparison. When it comes to protecting your data, you need to ask how much of your data is protected and how many threats it is protected against. Many companies operate with only nightly backups of their data. This provides the possibility of losing an entire day’s worth of data. This may be an acceptable loss, but often it is not. Differential and Transactional log backups can protect your data within minutes of your disaster. Transactional replication of your data can protect your data nearly instantly against some threats. A good database administrator is a very paranoid individual. What will happen to your data if a hard drive fails? What if you lose power? What about if the building is on fire? A well protected database may have a battery backup, backups sent to a location far away, backups kept on hand, redundant hardware, and servers protected from fire, flood, or vandalism.
A V A I L A B I L I T YIndexing is the cheapest and easiest way to improve the performance of your database. While the best indexing is part of performance tuning, relying on this entirely will provide extremely poor performance until it is complete. For this reason, our architecture process includes basic indexing, which will prepare you for many of your current and future needs.
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