Your database is the heart of your business. It lets your users quickly and easily organize and access their data, so they can gain valuable insights in real-time and make informed decisions. But as your database grows in age and complexity, it may start to present performance, security, compliance, and data quality issues.
For these reasons, it’s vital that you conduct regular database health checks. In this article, you’ll learn what database health checks are, how they work, and what tools and techniques to use. We’ll also cover how third-party support could be right for your business.
What is a database health check?
A database health check is a comprehensive evaluation of a database — including the data, or information, contained within the database — and the database management system (DBMS) used to access, retrieve, and modify the data.
The purpose of a database health check is to evaluate the current state of a database, identify and document known issues, and propose remedial solutions.
Typically, experienced database support engineers conduct database health checks. They use 24/7 database monitoring software to routinely monitor database health. They use automation and manual checks to identify faults and send alerts, and proactively address issues related to poor performance, interoperability, inaccurate data, outages, database neglect, and more.
Following this, engineers review the database health check results, prepare the report, and submit the report to the client for review. Then, with the client’s approval, the team will action the proposed remedial solutions.
Some of the most common issues a database health check may uncover include:
- Poor performance
- Data integrity issues
- Unreliable data backup strategy and disaster recovery plans
- Security gaps, and
- Non-compliance
The results of a database health check can serve as a useful baseline for future health checks and a point of reference when migrating a database to a new database environment (e.g., new hardware to the cloud).
Why are database health checks important?
Database health checks are important because they help your organization identify and resolve performance, data quality, security, and compliance issues. They also help you assess your IT infrastructure after a major event, such as the introduction of new hardware or software or a power outage.
Here are three other reasons why database health checks are important.
Fine-tune performance
A database may exhibit performance issues if it’s under a high workload, running on outdated hardware, low on disk storage space, or experiencing unexpected changes due to a recent software update or schema change. A database health check can identify the cause of these performance issues and propose solutions to address performance bottlenecks.
A database support engineer will identify the cause of your performance issues, and then use the right tools and techniques to address them. For example, optimizing your existing resources will save you time and money on investing in new CPU and memory.
Maintain data quality and integrity
Poor data quality costs organizations $12.9 million per year. This is because data integrity issues — disorganized, outdated, and inaccurate data — can slow down query response times, produce application crashes and errors, and negatively impact the user experience.
Here’s an example of a database consistency issue. A US database follows the MM/DD/YYYY format, but an EU database follows the DD/MM/YYYY format. If these two databases were to share time-related information with each other, the different date formats could result in an inconsistency error. Addressing this issue would be essential to both databases conveying the correct information.
Regular database health checks can help retain the accuracy, completeness, and consistency of data in a database. Data quality checks can help identify data duplication, format inconsistencies, incomplete data, and missing values. Engineers can then implement data standardization rules to improve database reliability and stability.
Improve security and compliance
Maintaining the security of a database is essential to preventing data theft, loss, and tampering due to internal and external threat actors. An unsecured database may also directly violate region- and industry-specific regulatory requirements, including data privacy and data sovereignty standards.
An example of an industry-specific requirement can be found in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). To ensure a database is HIPAA-compliant, all health data must be encrypted while in the database and during transit, and all users are required to have unique user IDs.
A database health check can help identify security gaps that allow threat actors to access parts of a DBMS they shouldn’t be able to. Minimizing the number of applications that can connect to the database can help prevent unauthorized access and isolate the database server from the application server.
Spinnaker Support can improve your database’s security by incorporating firewalls, access management (authentication, authorization), threat protection (automated threat detection), and information protection (data encryption, database backup and recovery).
When should you conduct a database health check?
The frequency with which you should conduct a database health check depends on the database’s current and potential future status.
Is the database exhibiting obvious symptoms of poor performance, data integrity issues, or instability under high workloads? Is the database having trouble recognizing and connecting to recently introduced or newly upgraded hardware? Has the environment hosting the database recently suffered a major power outage?
By far, though, proactive monitoring is the best way to minimize risk and maintain business continuity.
Routine database health checks from Spinnaker Support can help identify and resolve database issues before they escalate, saving clients time and money and offering greater peace of mind.
With 24/7 database monitoring from Spinnaker Support, you’ll gain the assurance that your database is consistently available, secure, and compliant with all regulatory requirements. Aside from responding to immediate, urgent requests, you also receive proactive support in the form of automated threat detection and alerts.
What happens during a database health check?
Many steps take place during a database health check. An engineer will comprehensively audit the database and compare the existing performance with expected performance benchmarks.
Below is a breakdown of the most common steps that occur during a database health check.
Compare existing performance to custom metrics
By setting database performance metrics, engineers can compare the existing performance of a database with expected performance benchmarks. These metrics may relate to query response times, transaction processing times, CPU and memory utilization, disk storage space, and more. Clients may set their own performance metrics or enlist the help of a third-party support provider to do it for them.
Query performance refers to the time it takes for a database to process a user request. The higher the response time, the longer a user must wait to perform a specific action. Engineers can help bridge the gap between existing and expected performance through performance optimization, reducing waiting times and improving the user experience.
Evaluate data backup and disaster recovery procedures
Monitoring the health of a backup database is just as important as monitoring the health of the original database. It ensures that the backup database is just as accurate, complete, and consistent as the original database, and free of corrupted or junk data.
To evaluate the data backup and disaster recovery process, an engineer will first evaluate the frequency of data backups. This can be a full backup once daily or several smaller backups carried out multiple times daily. The right backup schedule will depend on the desired recovery point objective (RPO), the maximum amount of data you can afford to lose due to a failure. Another factor to consider is the rate at which data changes in the database.
The location of the database backup should also be secure, whether it be onsite, in the cloud, or a combination of both. A database health check report will tell you if your database is secure and, if not, it will determine why your database is not secure. An engineer should also ensure the backup database is as accurate and consistent as the original one.
Improve performance
Evaluating the performance of a database involves using a wide variety of optimization techniques. Some of the most common metrics that engineers evaluate include query performance, response times, transactions, latency, and more.
Depending on the cause of the performance issues, an engineer may recommend CPU and memory upgrades. They may also examine the efficiency and effectiveness of your indexes (the speed with which the database retrieves data), and then optimize your indexes to improve response times.
Why choose Spinnaker Support for database health checks?
Spinnaker Support provides services designed to improve database performance, improve data quality and integrity, strengthen cybersecurity measures, and ensure compliance. We’re also strong advocates of securing databases with staff training, which is something our team will be happy to share with you.
Here’s how Spinnaker Support can help improve your database performance and stability.
We provide 24/7 monitoring and maintaining
Spinnaker Support provides 24/7 proactive monitoring, maintenance and alerts for Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft databases. Our qualified engineers can identify and address a variety of performance, security, data integrity, and compliance issues — before they escalate. They’ll also alert you to these issues, giving you a chance to evaluate the situation and respond. These services apply to older database versions, including databases as standalone or combined services.
We guarantee personalized support
Enterprise vendors like Oracle deploy self-service portals, meaning the client has to troubleshoot issues themselves. This arrangement wastes time and money and increases the risk of urgent matters being left unresolved.
To address this issue, Spinnaker Support assigns experienced, dedicated engineers to your account. This way, your matter is handled by real people, who have the skills and knowledge to support you.
Spinnaker Support responds quickly to your requests, too. When you submit a support ticket through us, an engineer will respond to your matter in minutes — not hours. Plus, if the issue is particularly complex, we can escalate it to a Level 4 engineer for additional support.
We support old and current databases
Many vendors are leaving older database versions behind. This means that customers have to upgrade, even if they’re not ready to do so, to keep using the vendor’s products and services.
Spinnaker Support provides third-party support for Oracle products version 8i and later. We also support a wide variety of SAP database types, both old and new, including:
- SAP HANA
- SPA Sybase / IQ / ASE
- SAP MaxDB
- Oracle Runtime Database
- Microsoft SQL Server, and
- UBM Db2
This enables you to retain what works for you now, and it gives you room to upgrade when the time is right for you.
We proactively defend you against the latest security threats
Proactive threat detection is vital to preventing internal and external threat actors from gaining unauthorized access to your database. While we make security a key focus of your database health checks, we also use automation to keep your defenses up through all hours of the day and night.
Our in-depth security measures prioritize timely recommendations, virtual patching, configuration changes, and more. Our flagship security service, Spinnaker Shield, takes a comprehensive approach to mitigating risk and managing vulnerabilities in your database.
These services are delivered by experienced security professionals, who use advanced tools and technology to analyze and evaluate your database to identify and resolve weaknesses. This helps strengthen your mainline defenses early, and consistently too.
Database health checks with Spinnaker Support
Regular health checks are vital to keeping your database available, secure, and compliant with the latest regulatory requirements. It can help you identify and resolve performance bottlenecks and potential security threats, ensure that your data backup and disaster recovery procedures are functional, and that your data aligns with current regulations.
With third-party database support from Spinnaker Support, you benefit from 24/7 continuous database monitoring and maintenance. This gives you the assurance that your most pressing database issues are proactively maintained by highly experienced engineers.
Contact us today for more information about Spinnaker Support’s third-party database support.