Summer’s coming. Is your business ready for the holidays?

17 Sep 2019 12560 views 0 minutes to read Contributors

You’ve arranged it all. Your flights are booked. Your passport is up to date. Now you’re ready to relax on your well-earned summer holiday.

But, have you been as well-organized about your business and database planning? Managing everyone’s summer break with the minimum amount of disruption is a challenge for every business, particularly once the school holidays get underway. How will you ensure your customer service doesn’t suffer or that project timelines don’t slip?

Here’s our three-point database checklist to help ease you into summer.

1. What will your database needs be over the summer?

Do you have any special events or sales periods that need extra support? Now is a good time to plan how many team members you might need at any given time. Then, you can map your business and project plans against your team’s annual leave calendar.

Remember to include one-off leave requests for sports events, festivals and family celebrations. There’s an important football world cup happening in Europe this year! Highlighting all the important dates early lets you see where the resource gaps and pressure points are.

2. Consider getting extra help

Hiring temporary or contract staff can certainly take the pressure off your team. As an added bonus, they can also bring excellent benefits to a business in terms of a fresh outlook, different experiences and new ways of solving problems. But, they may not be as familiar with your database environment as your regular team, so it’s worth organizing an internal or external database support helpline to answer any queries.

Depending upon the complexity of the role or task, you may need to invest in more experienced extra team members. Or, you could consider a Virtual Database Administrator (vDBA); this can be an efficient way to plug gaps in internal projects so timelines don’t slip. But, remember to plan ahead as the right people may not always be available at short notice.

3. Give your database a pre-holiday health check

You’ll find it easier to relax on holiday knowing everything at work is under control. Ever thought of checking your database environment before going on holiday? Running a database health check will give you the insight and detailed information you need to fix any issues. Then, you get to go on holiday knowing that everything is working well.

For even greater peace of mind, consider downloading a Desired State Configurator tool to automate your SQL installation and deployment tasks. You can design it to meet your needs and schedule it to keep an eye on your database while you’re away. You can even set it to automatically revert to your original configurations if someone makes a change.

No-one can guarantee that nothing will go wrong with your database while you’re on holiday. But, if you start planning and working on it now, you can minimize the risk of disruption to your customers and projects. And, don’t forget about your teams – robust planning demonstrates you care about their needs as well.

Don’t leave it too late

Plan ahead and fix your database bugs now. Even small gestures, such as a database helpline or vDBA to call on, can go a long way to keeping your team spirit as high as the summer temperatures.

You shouldn’t have to worry about your database when you’re on holiday. Get in touch with us today and see how we can help you plan everything you need to keep your SQL environment running smoothly this summer.