A healthy database is essential for staff productivity, customer satisfaction and keeping your company’s efficiency high.
If you haven't kept up with database maintenance and tuning, you're probably experiencing a slew of performance issues.
When your database slows down, your company suffers as well. Many businesses are unsure what a health check is, when they can get one, and how to proceed afterward, despite how straightforward it sounds.
A health check is a database inspection to see how safe and functional the system is, as the name implies. A database administrator (DBA) will assess overall configuration, query accuracy, data protection, index quality, data maintenance procedures, and security to gain a full understanding of the issues.
Making time for routine health checks can save a lot of time, but we still see clients who neglect to do so, resulting in a variety of problems.
If you're having some of the issues mentioned below, it's time to seek professional help.
You're experiencing poor performance: This is a clear sign that your database is in need of some TLC. It's time to schedule a health check when you see problems like sluggish query returns, slow applications, and crashes.
You're discussing additional hardware: Although additional hardware is sometimes needed, it is not always the best option. Many businesses rely on additional processors, faster storage, or a new server, but they just needed a health check to identify places where they could improve and innovate.
Your database has been neglected: You'd love to be able to upgrade your system or instal a service pack whenever the opportunity presents itself. Some people find it difficult to test restoring from backups on a regular basis because they don't have the staff or skills in-house to properly maintain and care for a database environment.We don't all realise what we're overlooking, but a health check will help you spot places that have been overlooked and need attention. It can also be as easy as a company that is stuck in its ways, still doing things the same way, and didn't realise there was a better way
You've had an outage: Even if you know what caused the outage — whether it was corrupt files, device disruption, or a hardware failure — there might be something else lurking in the shadows. Health tests will not only assist you in addressing the current issue, but they will also help you identify any other possible risks.
Every healthy database should follow some useful practices and basic sanity checks are very essential for an astounding outcome of SQL. Below are few important mentions of the best practices and basic sanity check,
Best practices for SQL server:
Conduct general health checks every 6 to 12 months
Create documentation and associate it with production and test SQL Servers to supplement operations and routine maintenance
Identify all the health issues during the health check and then develop a remediation plan. Don’t try to fix the issues during the health check because doing so muddles the results and slows down the health check process. And the fix for one issue might affect another.
Basic sanity check requirements:
Retain all health check documentation and information for future use
Allocate enough space on mission-critical databases and transaction logs to accommodate their growth
Manage antivirus scanning, excluding specific files within SQL Server
Use Windows Authentication
No one should log in as the Service Account to do administration
On account of all the above mentioned practices and requirements, GeoPITS will help you problem-solve, implement, identify baselines, monitor systems, optimize your health check report, maintain and tune your database in an organized systematic way.
Read how we helped TVS Motors, a leading Indian motorcycle company boost its DB performance, consolidate and optimize their SQL server environments. Among the many optimisations, GeoPits improved the company’s average query execution by three times.
