No matter how good you are with databases, you can never avert a database failure. Very few businesses can proudly claim that they have never experienced a failure in the databases. No business would like to have a database failure as it hinders their reputation and drastically brings down the morale of the company employees. However, the bitter truth is they do occur, costing the business a lot of damage. In fact, a database failure brings the whole business to a stop.
The business owner, the staff, and others need to drop everything and take the needed steps to ensure the database is up and running fast. The need for the hour for all businesses, both small and large, to ensure their databases are evaluated regularly to identify issues at an early stage. In this way, they can beef up the performance and the functionality of the database to reduce failures.
The importance of databases to modern businesses today
The livelihood of a business or an organization, to be more precise, rests on the functionality and performance of its database. Getting data systems up and operating as soon as possible can take a lot of toll on the company, customers, and staff.
Smart companies go the extra step and learn for every database failure that takes place in the business. They go deep into their root causes to ensure they are not repeated in the future. It is here that they need the support of qualified and credible database management administrators and consultants for the job.
If you are a business owner and wish to protect your company from database failures, you need to know about the general types of database failures and their prime causes. Let us take a look at them below-
3 main types of database failures in database management systems
- System crashes- This is an SOS situation for any business. When the database does crash, the business needs to immediately reinstate the processes that have been affected or, even worse, work towards the recovery of lost data.
A system crash generally refers to any sort of hardware malfunction or bugs present in the operating system or the database software. It generally brings the whole business process to a halt and causes a loss of valuable content that resides inside the main memory, RAM, cache memory, and more.
Database crashes can be attributed to several reasons. You should, as a business owner, maintain stringent maintenance and security routines. The protocols in your company concerning the above should be strict.
Professionals from leading database administration and support company RemoteDBA suggest you pay attention to the database, network, and host system. They must ensure minimal downtime for your business to function successfully. In case something does happen, the DBA of your business should have a well-documented crisis plan to reinstate and restore the database to bring it up and running as soon as possible.
- Media failure– This is a very risky situation. Many media failures are the result of unreadable media or a head crash. This sort of data failure is considered serious as it is responsible for total data loss in most cases. Whenever a media failure takes place, the database system is unavailable for many hours. The recovery time is long, especially when there are high volumes of transactions and large devices used by the business. The most effective way for you as a business owner to prevent media failure is to safeguard the data with sufficient malware protection. You should ensure that you regularly take data backups to reduce the chances of data loss in media failure.
- Software errors in the application- When the limits in resources have exhausted, there is bad input, internal or logical errors, or any other similar issue with the business application software, it becomes compromised, and transactions fail, giving way to database failures.
Experts in database management recommend businesses to ensure application software problems are minimized in the code during the process of software engineering and conception. It is ideal for developers to place controls and mechanisms in the right place when the architecture is being designed and in the coding operation. They should not have the approach to rectify these errors later.
Besides errors in the software application, there have been cases where a malicious code might exploit vulnerabilities, especially those that are linked with a specific software tool or any known software code error by a developer.
Ask for a free database evaluation
In order to check the health of your business database, it is prudent to approach a credible database management administration company for a free software evaluation. There are esteemed companies that offer you this service to detect problems and boost the database’s performance and functionality.
The task of evaluating any business database is not a simple task. If you do not have an experienced DBA in your organization, you should bank on remote DBA companies to do the job for you. You have the option to give them a project-based task, or you can hire them for the continuous maintenance and support of your database.
In database evaluation, the user interface and the content of the database are not one and the same thing. You might discover there are several similarities in databases if the same vendor creates them, but generally, they are different from one another. In the evaluation process, the DBA will check all the aspects of the database to list the problems, suggestions, and recommendations that should be embraced by the business. This database evaluation is often referred to as a database health check by some companies as well.
When you are hiring database management companies for the task, ensure they have proven track records in the field. The team of experts in the company should be trained and skilled in the latest database technologies. The company should have positive online reviews and customer testimonials to assure you that your business database is in safe hands.
