A catastrophic failure occurs. There is a backup but you have some lag to pull it from your remote storage or cloud provider. You also need an available and experienced DBA no matter what time it is to handle this as seamlessly as possible. How can your DB system help you overcome this and put your business back on track ASAP?
Where do you start from?
Your business might have many distinct levels of criticality and the first step is to ask yourself some questions to identify where a failure can put it at risk. The two most important ones are: What are your limits for acceptable data loss and downtime? Which point-in-time is enough for your business to get back running?
There are two concepts you can use job function email list to answer those questions: Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
RPO is at which point in time you want your data available – at least 2 minutes back of healthy records before the failure, for example.
RTO is the time SLA for your business to get back running within the RPO you defined. For example, you want the service reestablishment in a maximum of 3 minutes. Take a look at which point are your databases currently. Based on these answers, you can start planning your Business Continuity Plan.
Outage types
Understanding what types of outages your SQL Server can suffer from can help you choose the right infrastructure and features to overcome them.
When something fails and only affects these dedicated professionals can be called one server, like an OS crash, patch installation failure, failing RAM/CPU, disk failure, you need a High Availability solution to move your resources to.
Sometimes your problems are widespread, like network switches or SAN failures, natural disasters like fire, flood, power outage, and so many others. Then, you need a Disaster Recovery solution, such as moving your resources to another datacenter room or location, for example.
Database corruption might occur within SAN failures, SQL bugs that also need processes, and plans to fix that corruption. Human errors include wrong table or database drops, updates without a where clause, and so on.
Features
How can SQL Server help you get rid buy lead of outages? Here are the features that will leverage your business’s high availability in a secure and robust fashion.
Backup and Restore – Yes! The most basic piece of data recovery must be taken into account! Make sure your backups are meeting your RPO and RTO and test them periodically. There are different types of backups, full, differentials, transactional log, and also filegroups, that can especially bring your database online faster by pieces.
Replication – Copy and distribute data between databases on local or remote instances at scheduled intervals, with many directions and types available. Replicate only data, ideal for specific subsets and to send/receive data to/from specific locations, like store branches, distribution centers, etc.
Log Shipping – Automated backup and restore of the transactional log to another local or remote database, with read-only replicas available (Standby).