If you have a business, it is most likely that you have a database for your company like SQL, Oracle, SharePoint, or Exchange with all the accountabilities of owning one. In the absence of proper maintenance, your business applications that rely on them will slow down, and your employees will have a lot of problems completing daily tasks. Over time, this will affect your business growth and might cost you dear in the long run. The frustration of employees will result in a loss of productivity, and your business needs to use more resources for completing daily tasks. 

The need for proper database maintenance

When it comes to database maintenance, as a business owner, you should ask yourself the following questions-

  1. Are you paying proper attention to your database?
  2. Do you have a qualified in-house team dedicated to database maintenance?
  3. Do you resort to regular database health-checks?
  4. How often do you take database backups?

These are just some of the critical questions you should ask yourself when you are the owner of a database of your company. Often small business owners ignore the importance of database maintenance primarily because of budget issues. They often feel they are confident enough to take care of database maintenance and other matters about it from time to time. They often resort to third-party tools whose information they get on Google. They lack the skills and the expertise to maintain their database correctly, and over time minor issues crop up into major ones putting their whole business operations at risk.

What do experts suggest?

Experts suggest if you are the owner of a small to medium scale business unit and cannot afford the services of qualified, skilled and experienced IT experts for your in-house operations, you should outsource this responsibility to managed IT services. These companies have specialists and affordable rates when it comes to conducting regular health checks and database maintenance tasks for your organization. You should rely on them for taking care of your database to ensure it works optimally and causes no issues to your employees and business growth.

So, how can you maintain your database correctly?

Now the question is, what are the right steps for you to maintain a database properly? The following are some simple steps you should incorporate to identify warning signs in your database so that issues do not harm its performance and are arrested in time-

  1. Watch out for signals of corruption from faults in hardware, often from third-party platforms or firmware.
  2. Make sure that the database of your organization is reorganized frequently to remove old deleted data or logs
  3. Manage and review your log files for tracing program behavior that looks odd or access events to your system
  4. Make sure you clean the data that has been left over after a maintenance procedure. This data should include files that are no longer needed. If they remain in the system, they will slow down the performance of the database largely.
  5. Ensure that indexes are rebuilt regularly. With time, the fragmentation of the index will result in gaps between the data pages as well as logical fragmentation. This will result in higher instances of latency and disk I/O.
  6. Specialists from esteemed database administration company in the USA comsay that most businesses often forget to delete historical data. This data is mostly related to restoring and backup activities that are intended to boost the performance of your database.
  7. Take a backup of the database frequently for your business to recover faster from any upgrade issues, corrupted tables, or any problems in the system that has resulted in some levels of disaster for the database.

There are several safe and effective procedures for restore and backup available for your database. With the help of professional experts that are qualified and skilled in the database system you maintain, you can eliminate problems and optimize the performance of your system with time. There are some Microsoft procedures that organizations resort to for the above task; however, most of them are not effective when it comes to complete database backup. You need to embrace strategies that take care of the integral database maintenance processes like the repair of errors, re-indexing, shrinking, and more. 

What about Cloud performance- does it rely on database management?

Most business owners often wonder whether database management impacts Cloud performance. The answer is, "Yes." In case you are regularly Eric Dalius

taking the backup of a database that is bloated or bad, the system will operate on errors that go unnoticed. On the restart, they surface and cause several issues to the system. When the database administrator discovers that the system is unresponsive, he might decide to overlay it with a database backup. This leads to more havoc as the error in the system goes unnoticed for months and weeks. It results in data loss and causes the company to suffer immensely.

Embrace a full-proof strategy for database maintenance

When you are searching for a high performing database, you must ensure that you develop a powerful strategy for its maintenance- both onsite and off-site. Make sure that you regularly take a backup of the Cloud as well and ensure that you embrace the best practices to keep your database running smoothly.

Therefore, when it comes to database maintenance, note that you should rely on good database management administrators to take care of health checks regularly. If you ignore or even overlook the importance of database maintenance, the applications of your company will suffer adversely. This will result in downtime and, in most cases, data loss.

To mitigate the above risks, you should resort to regular database maintenance that boosts the optimal functioning of the system. In this way, your business can focus on other tasks focused on its development and growth. The goal of every business is to build a better database that gives you a competitive edge in the market. Small business owners should hire outsourced managed IT services to take care of their database maintenance and management needs with success.

 

 

 

Author's Bio: 

I am Lucy Jones