1. Low maintenance on pre-deployment scripts
There are many reasons how this could occur.
- Databases become destabilized when they don’t have the needed keys and indexes to eliminate redundancy and improve response time.
- The latest upgrades of a system software and the database aren’t functioning well together, resulting in poor performance.
- The planning of your database configuration is mismanaged.
2. Database is on the wrong server
The race for server hosting has never been so competitive as today! It can be very tempting to configure your system or plan an upgrade for a cheaper rate. Without careful strategy, your database and information can wind up on shared servers which can deny users when the network is full in shared resource usage. This can happen for reasons like poor configuration or query, faulty application coding, or even a compromised application/database. The effect is that the database is deficient in resources including memory and processing.
3. Your application and queries can be hostile
This can happen when your application’s data access layer (if you have it) is not programmed correctly. It causes slow queries or too many queries being issued. These queries can be made when there is under/over-utilization of indexes and bi-directional table joins. This in turn causes indexes to be wasteful, flawed, and even absent. It all comes down to lousy quality design, lack of standards, bad coding, and poor optimization queries.
4. Hardware and Software failures
A host server hardware or power failure can crash your database server to stop very suddenly. It can be pretty scary! Safeguarding quality hardware, a power backup plan, and rigorous system administration maintenance are the solutions to any kind of crash prevention.
5. Limited amount of memory and swap space
A database uses memory based on buffers, caches, and log files such as data files and index files. The database buffer cache is the place where the database server duplicates data from data files and place for processing. As data volume increases on the database, the information located on the file system will increase too. If an equal amount of memory is not allocated for in-memory resources, the database will try to grab SWAP memory. And of course, if there isn’t enough SWAP space available, the database server may stop the operation or crash due to lack of memory.
6. File permission and corruptions
A great number of database crashes are caused by file permission issues, corrupted data, and index files. There are several reasons for this:
- Other processes are modifying a data or index that is written by the database without accurate locking.
- Database server processes are using the same data directory in the host system that does not contain support for good file system locking or external file locking. This can disable the database servers.
- The database server tries to read/write from an already crashed and corrupted data/index file.
- A defective piece of hardware, such as I/O corrupting a data/index file.
7. No expert DBA on board the team
Systems can fail when you do not have a proactive DBA who has foresight and planning solution skills. A DBA provider can OVERSEE EVERYTHING for you. They can check data integrity, monitor the logs, catch problems, scale your system needs, and optimize performance space. This takes constant planning and critical organization to prevent system crashes that can seriously harm your database, as well as your business.
By taking these 7 reasons for database failures in mind, choose a DBA that can provide you immediate results. Abtech has a full range of remote DBA services for Oracle, SQL, and Informix. If you need to hire a DBA, please speak to Abtech first. We can reduce the cost and increase the quality of maintenance on your database servers.
Don’t wait until your system crashes or fails! We are here for you!