Are database nightmares losing you money and customers?

17 Sep 2019 23199 views 0 minutes to read Contributors

When applications slow down, or even shut down, your ability to perform core business functions is often hard. This can cause loss of sales, loss of productivity and low employee morale as they’re faced with responding to a host of frustrated customers; the costs will ripple through your business. That’s before we get into the potential cost of customer compensation and the harder to quantify damage to your brand. Sometimes the solution is not in the applications but adjustments in the database will solve the problem.

The need to protect against database outages and poor performance cannot be overstated. Database monitoring and finding issues in time can help your applications remain healthy and accessible. But, without solid monitoring in place, database problems can go unnoticed until it’s too late and your business is losing money and customers fast.

The top five database time killers

1. Are our back-ups running as they should be? A good database maintenance plan ensures back-ups are running regularly and at a time when they will not affect other business functions.
2. What disc space do we have? If your disc is almost full with data, your database will eventually break.
3. Is the database structure clean? To ensure your database has accurate data and is running as fast as possible, you must make sure it’s not overloaded with data that is no longer needed.
4. Is our database scaled correctly? Is it running on the right machine with the right disc space and memory capacity for the required tasks? Even simply monitoring memory usage can win you a lot of performance.
5. Are queries optimized for the task? Often queries are slow running because they are not structured in an optimal way.

Monitoring should be a high priority for every Database Administrator (DBA)

Paying attention to these five key metrics means your DBA will be able to notice when something is wrong with your database, before you start getting complaints from users about slow performance. But, database monitoring is also probably the DBA’s most time consuming task. Integrating monitoring tools designed specifically for the SQL database environment with your existing hardware monitoring tools can save a huge amount of time. They’ll monitor your database 24/7 and alert you when, for example, disc space or memory is close to capacity or a back-up has failed.

Maintaining the health of your database environment keeps it running as fast and smoothly as possible. That means fewer performance complaints from users. Most importantly, it means no nasty surprises, loss of revenue or angry customers.

Are you doing everything you can to avoid database disasters?

Don’t wait for the nightmare wake-up call. The smart solution is to take a vigilant and proactive approach to your system’s performance management. This greatly reduces your risk of encountering issues with your database environment.

If you have any questions or concerns about your database performance, get in touch with us. We’ll see how we can help you monitor everything you need to keep your SQL environment running smoothly.