The scariest word for any DBA is – Database Downtime. Every DBA who is going off duty for the day or going away on vacation for a month is always worried about Database Downtime. I totally sympathize with everyone who is constantly worried about their database’s downtime. In the real world, we all know when our database does down, it means that our business is stopped. There is no other analogy we can give.
I am fortunate that during my job as a Data Consultant, I get to visit different organizations across the world and get to meet some finest Data Professionals and Business Leaders. During our interaction always one thing which comes up and that is Continuity of the Business. Every single organization understands a disruption in the business continuity for end customer can be way more expensive at the end of the day than it looks on the surface.
This brings the most anticipated question
How to avoid database downtime to keep our business running continuously and efficiently?
If you look at the question again, there are two very important asks – Continuously and Efficiently.
It is not important that our website is available and our database is online, it is equally important that we run our business also efficiently.
I am very much sure that you might be tempted to answer some kind of the solution at this point of time but before you say anything we must also understand that there are few more challenges when we are talking about the real world database downtime issues.
Before we talk about the solutions let us explore the three big challenges every single organization faces
Challenge 1: Multiple Database Platforms
In my professional life, I have seen only hardly any organizations using a single database platform. The most of the organizations have multiple database platforms running their critical business applications. I have quite commonly seen AWS, MySQL, SAP, SQL Server and other databases working together. The situation of multiple database platforms makes the entire downtime issue further complicated.
Challenge 2: Hybrid and Heterogeneous
Every single day, I have seen more and more businesses opting for cloud for their database needs. Now though cloud looks very promising, yet many organizations have to run their application on-premises. I have often seen organizations struggling to balance their business workload across on-premises and on a cloud. Now think about it, when you have entire two different database platform with a hybrid scenario, it is indeed a complex to maintain database uptime.
Challenge 3: Analytics and Monitoring
It is very important for any organization to have to right set of tools when having massive data movement across various database platforms. We need to have right monitoring tools for performance, conflict resolutions, data comparison as well as real-time analytics. Now when the database goes down, all of such functionality also disappears. Running enterprise-grade application requires much more than just database is online.
Now that we have three important challenges in front of us. We need to find a solution which overcomes all the three challenges and provide a simple solution for data availability.
SharePlex – Avoiding Database Downtime via Replication
Here is the where I suggest SharePlex to my customers. It is a very unique solution which replicates data from Oracle or SQL Server to more than a dozen other platforms, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), AuroraDB, Azure SQL Database service, EDB Postgres Advanced Server, Java Message Service (JMS), Kafka, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SAP ASE, SAP HANA, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, EDB Postgres Advanced Server, Teradata, Kafka, and flat, SQL and XML files. (Overcoming Challenge 1)
Additionally, with the help of this, we can migrate to cloud-based or open-source databases with near-zero downtime while allowing your daily operational processes to continue uninterrupted. (Overcoming Challenge 2). And Finally, Shareplex has built-in monitoring, conflict resolution, data comparison and synchronization capabilities which helps users to run their enterprise-grade application without downtime (Overcoming Challenge 3).
Here is the next action for you – Download Free Trial of SharePlex and validate it for your application. As I said earlier the best part of this product is that it replicates data in any environment which avoids the database downtime.
Reference: Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)
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