Tips to Minimize Downtime

Down timeIf you run a business, even a small one, chances are good that you interact with a database of some sort. And if you interact with a database, it’s quite likely that you have already learned the most important lesson of Database 101:

Things go wrong.

It’s true. No matter how careful you are, things will go wrong.

Of course you should still take the time and devote the resources necessary to maintain your database. You should certainly research and utilize certain industry “best practices” in the creation and maintenance of your database. These include using consistent column name prefixes and suffixes, using meaningful column names (rather than random characters or non-intuitive abbreviations), and – of course – backing up your data. In order to be really safe, however, it may be advisable to implement certain, shall we say, less orthodox security measures. You might consider a moat, or an electric fence – not together, though. When it comes to the safety of your data, no security is too extreme. A shrewd manager may even consider environmental factors when planning the location of a database center. Is the area prone to electrical storms or earthquakes or army ants? Is it beneath a lake?

Unfortunately, no matter how many precautions you take, disaster will strike from time to time. Somebody will accidentally delete something. Soda will be spilled. A power surge could occur during the transfer of an important file. In July of this year one of the largest European sports websites experienced a significant disruption to its online service for most of a day. The reason for the disruption? Hardware failure caused by a water leak. When these things happen, as they are bound to, it is important to have systems in place to mitigate the damage.

One way to minimize damage after a failure is to employ a monitoring and alerting solution. Real-time alerts in the event of a failure obviate the need for user complaints and Help Desk inquiries and minimize downtime, as well as the huge cost associated with it.

One of the most important weapons in the war against database failure is a SQL server recovery tool, which can repair and recover corrupt SQL Server MDF database files. Regardless of the cause of the failure or the nature of the corruption, a good recovery tool can usually restore the server to its pre-failure state. In a world where so much can go wrong, the ability to recover data can often be a life – and business – saver.

Datanumen has everything you need to build your own data repair and recovery toolkit. From Word repair to Excel recovery, Outlook repair and SQL recovery, our software is trusted by Fortune 500 companies worldwide.

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