How to Plan for Both Sporadic and Chronic Incidents in a SQL Server Disaster Recovery Plan

In this article we consider contingencies to deal with both chronic and sporadic incidents and formulate a comprehensive SQL Server disaster recovery plan.

While creating a disaster recovery plan for SQL Server data, your plan should not just be aimed at protecting the assets, but also focus on what kind of assets is it meant for. A lot of thought and planning goes into creating a disaster recovery plan, and you should always create a plan depending on what kind of data do you count as being as your asset. Different types of data are often protected by using different kind of data. The plan should be created and managed by SQL professionals, the plan you create should be able to survive both Sporadic and Chronic incidents.

Planning for Sporadic and Chronic incidents in a Disaster Recovery Plan.

To ensure that the plan you created is ideal for both, chronic and sporadic incidents, you will have to make use of certain Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These include Outcome indicator, which basically confirms that the program worked. Another one is the Activity indicator, this helps in determining the effectiveness of daily protectiveness. By making use of MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul) for reliability, you will be able to create a plan that can fight against both chronic and sporadic incidents.

• Chronic Incidents – These incidents involve any kind of variation from the expected and accepted performance. The solution is derived from reducing the variation as much as possible, and bringing the outcomes to the accepted ones. These are usually considered as the ‘Accepted losses’, since they are only deviations from normal and do not indicate any kind of emergency. You might have to pay attention to these, but you will not have to make a lot of changes to correct these. They fall in the category of ‘Planned downtime’, which requires taking the system offline for patches, hardware changes, updates, etc. These are very normal, that they are often considered part of the process, much like error messages from the disk, due to lack of storage.
• Sporadic Incidents – These can be considered to be more or less the opposite of chronic incidents. These are severe, unpredictable and need urgent attention. The good part about them is, they are not frequent. However, when they occur, it will certainly cost you, both time and money. They do not get resolved easily; these are the kinds of incidents everyone should have practiced dealing with, because when they occur there is usually lot of panic, leading to more confusion. It is recommended to always include the real and narrow escape incidents in reviews, to always have a record and fix sql issues without delays.

Both of these incidents form the most common database disasters, and creating a database recovery plan to fight both of these incidents is a must. Either one of these can occur any time, causing damage, which might not be undo-able. The severity of both will differ, which is why it is important for the user to always be prepared, and focus on the types of assets while creating a plan.

Author Introduction:

Victor Simon is a data recovery expert in DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including repair accdb problem and sql recovery software products. For more information visit www.datanumen.com