If you are a business owner, you need to ensure your database performs well and functions without hassles. However, if you are not careful and do not maintain the database properly, it will crash and hamper business operations. This is where you need to partner with good database administrators to ensure your database is looked after well so that there are no downtimes and crashes.
Database crashes will cause irreversible losses to your business. Your clients and customers will be adversely affected. No matter how good your infrastructure is if you do not maintain the database well enough, it is bound to crash.
Before you take action steps to avert database crashes, you should know what causes your database to crash. In this way, you will be aware of how important it is to your business and why you should devote a team of experts to maintain it round the clock.
What causes your database to crash?
To get a competitive edge in the market over your peers, you need to know the reasons behind database crashes. In this way, you can keep losses at bay and function smoothly in the market. The following are the key causes of database crashes that you must be aware of-
- Pre-deployment scripts have not been maintained properly – There are three main reasons for the above to occur-
- The database has become destabilized after it does not have the necessary indexes and keys to boost response times and remove redundancy
- The latest upgrade to the database is not functioning properly, resulting in low performance
- The planning of the database configuration has not been managed well
- The database is on the wrong server – The demand for server hosting is great now, and it faces serious competition. As a business owner, it really can be tempting for you to configure the system or plan and upgrade at cheaper costs. However, if you are not careful, the information of your business or your database will ultimately land on servers shared with others. This poses issues for the end-user as they will be denied access when the network is at its peak. There are several reasons for this to take place, the prime ones being a faulty application code, compromised app or database, or poor queries or configurations. The result is the database is not adequate with resources, including processing and memory
- The queries and the applications are hostile – If the access layers of your application data are programmed incorrectly, it will give you slow queries or issue too many queries. They are created when there is both an under or overutilization of bi-directional table joins and indexes. This again causes these indexes to become useless and result in waste. They can be flawed and become absent as well. This is due to the poor design quality, bad codes, optimization queries being poor, and a lack of a quality standard.
- Failures in software and hardware – If there are software and hardware failure, the database server will come to a sudden halt and crash. Now, this can be scary. This is where you need to ensure that the quality hardware is protected with a backup power plan. You need to consult experts for maintaining the system administration rigorously to get solutions for preventing any server crash. To know more in this field, contact qualified experts from RemoteDBA.
- The amount of swap space and memory is limited – Every database deploys memory based on log files, buffers, and caches like index and data files. This is the place where the server database duplicates data from these files and sets them out for processing. With the increase of data volume on the server, the system files’ information increases too. If the database does not get the equal amount of memory allocated for in-memory resources, it will attempt to get SWAP memory. So, if there isn’t sufficient SWAP space available, the database server stops the operations resulting in a database crash due to insufficient memory.
- Corruptions and file permissions – There are many database crashes caused by problems in file permissions, index files, and corrupted data. The above is attributed to the following reasons-
- Other processes are modifying an index or data that has been written by the server database without proper locking.
- The database server processes currently use a similar data directory in the host without good external file locking or file system locking. This will disable database servers.
- The server attempts to write/read from an index or data file that has already crashed
- There is a flawed piece of hardware like I/O that is corrupting the index or the data file.
- The IT team does not have a qualified or experienced DBA – Most databases crash because the IT team in the company does not have an experienced and proactive DBA to plan accurately for the avoidance of server crashes. When you have a good DBA on your database maintenance team, you get a professional who checks the data, catches issues, monitors the logs correctly, scales up the system’s needs, and optimizes the performance space. All of the above need constant planning and serious organization. If you hire the right DBA, you can prevent system crashes that have the potential to seriously harm the performance of your database resulting in a crash.
In order to ensure your database functions well without any crash, you need to hire professional DBAs from a good company. These experts will save costs and improve the maintenance of your database servers. It would help if you spoke to them first to understand more about their functions. Good companies have experience with Oracle, SQL, MongoDB, etc., servers. You should ensure the company you choose has proven track records in the field. Compare services and prices. Call in the experts for a complete evaluation of your systems so that you eliminate database crashes, improve response times to the end-user, and perform effectively in the market.