Downtimes can cost you a lot. Just imagine your online store going offline for an hour or so. All that lost sales is only the tip of the iceberg.

You also have to deal with pissed-off buyers who may go to a competitor to buy the products they need. If it happens quite often, people will begin thinking that you’re not reliable.

The lower sales, bad reputation, and disgruntled customers will eventually take a toll on your success and can even lower your stock price. At its worst, it can put your company in danger of shutting down.

What your database needs

Most downtimes happen because of issues with software or because of human error. To ensure that your database is always online, it needs:

• A robust management infrastructure that can monitor the health, performance, and status of your database, as well as one that has facilities for service transitions and changes.
• The ability to identify and handle failures.
• The ability to scale up when you need more resources and to keep performance up.
• The ability to detect and handle conflicts, as well as protect your system from data loss.
• Maintenance without having to take your database online.

What needs high availability?

If you have a challenging time trying to keep up with availability, a good idea is to classify and rank the services you have.

Mission-critical services should always be available, followed by business-critical services. Then you have task-critical services and then the non-essential services.

Ideally, all of these services should be always available, but if that’s not possible, you at least have to make sure that mission- and business-critical services are.

For each of these categories, you should also have recovery time and recovery point objectives.

Recovery time objective is the amount of downtime before things get serious and business continuity is broken. Meanwhile, the recovery point objective means the point where data must be recovered after a downtime happens.

How to get HA

Database replication is the process wherein you have duplicates of your main database. These duplicates are stored in different servers and even different sites.

Think of it this way: You have a master database and it replicates into two slave databases. If the master database fails, either one of the slaves will become the master database.

This ensures that your database will always be available even if the master crashes.

Your database should be able to automate the assignment of primary and secondary roles. It should also be able to select a new primary database if the old one dies.

The automation goes further, such as being able to switch read/write modes between primary and secondary nodes.

Your database needs to be scalable as well. Further, MySQL’s InnoDB makes HA a whole lot easier to achieve.

MySQL has high availability and scaling features that you can use right out of the box. InnoDB makes it easier to perform group replication, asynchronous replication, and even gives you one-stop shell. It will allow you to deploy or manage clusters. It also has other useful features and functionalities.

Call Four Cornerstone if you want high availability for your database!

Four Cornerstone can help you ensure that your database is always online.  The team has expert knowledge and knowhow in all things Oracle and MySQL. You can rely on us for your HA initiatives. Call (817) 377-1144 today.

Photo courtesy of MySQL.