I don’t care if you’re selling bulk widgets or providing financial information on emerging markets, if you rely on data and servers for any function of your business, backups should be the single most important item on your IT checklist.
An all-time favorite question of mine to ask business owners or IT managers, following “do you have backups”, is “how do you know your backups work”? The resounding silence and dumbfounded looks this question summons are almost a guarantee.
If you’re sporting that same look right now, here are 5 simple steps to follow that can help ensure when disaster strikes, you can strike back with a successful data recovery.
1. Perform a test recovery.
This sounds so obvious and simple, but hardly anyone actually does it. This is as simple as it sounds. Attempt to recover you data to an alternate location (don’t overwrite your production data), and test the dataset.
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MyISAM is the default storage engine in MySQL, but many people forget there are other choices. Deciding which storage engine(s) to use can be tricky, but it’s worth evaluating whether or not MyISAM suits your needs. There are a number of storage engines available, but I will focus on MyISAM and InnoDB as these are used most often.
Some things to consider:
- Do you need foreign keys?
- Do you need transactions?
- Do you need full text indexes?
- What are your data access (query) patterns?
- How large is your data set?
Reviewing the above points will get you going in the right direction, but there are exceptions.
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In today’s world, mobility is a must have. Nowadays the Internet is available everywhere, yet many people don’t take advantage of their mobile Internet for anything other then simple web browsing. Why is this? For starters, many people don’t have the security required to access their ‘work’ from locations other than their office. Users often face obstacles due to limitations of older VPN technologies, or more stringent security filtering by Network Administrators at hotels or WiFi Hot Spots.
Older VPN clients based on IPSec required either ESP (protocol 50) or AH (protocol 51) to be opened. In the past, these Administrators would just allow IP any out. These days, limiting access to well known ports is more common. I myself have run into this issue many times over, and my solution is to use SSL based VPNs.
Why would SSL based VPNs help in this case? Well, there are 2 main reasons: Firstly, SSL is a widely used port, so places will not block this (could you imagine the uproar by Web based vendors if this was the case??). Secondly, Cisco offers 3 different levels of SSL VPN depending on the machine you are using, so you don’t have to have administrative access on the machine or the ability to install software.
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This is Part II of the article “SQL Server High Availability Choices.” Click here for Part I.
In Part 1 of this article we covered failover clustering. Here in Part II will continue the high availability discussion with database mirroring to provide the necessary information to ensure that you are choosing the right solution for your environment.
Database mirroring requires that your application is mirror aware. Making an application mirror aware could be as simple as modifying a connection string to be aware of the failover partner, or it could involve more complex changes.
The configuration for database mirroring is much less complex than with clustering. There is still the need for at least two servers but there is no requirement for an Active Directory domain, shared storage device, and multiple networks (a backend network is recommended). To provide the automatic failover functionality, you will need to have a third SQL Server instance known as the witness.
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In most cases, ‘bigger’ has always been considered to be better. This has been obvious for years in the skyscraper wars and throughout the 60′s with the American auto manufacturers each out-doing one another with larger and larger displacement engines. In the computer world this translates to the ‘scale up’ or ‘scale out’ models of thinking. One can argue in either direction depending on the specific requirements of the project at hand.
Taking the “bigger is better” mentality into application configuration tends to be where things quickly fall apart. Without fully understanding what certain configuration values do and how a simple change in something like the MaxClients value in Apache will affect the number available connections to your MySQL database; a novice systems administrator can quickly bring even the biggest hardware to its knees. I see cases like this day-in and day-out in various configurations ranging from a Web server to NFS server. I’ll show a few specific examples of cases where bigger was clearly not better.
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