Database Health Check

 What is a Database health check:

As the term suggests, a health check is a database inspection to determine how healthy and efficient the system is. A DBA (Database Administration) will evaluate overall configuration, query performance, data safety, index efficiency, data maintenance procedures, and security to completely understand the issues. Database health checks review and analyze the current database performance of the company. It helps you focus on optimization.

• Database health checks can be used to collect knowledge about your environment

What are the signs that your database isn't good:

The signs show that your database is good or needs some attention.

• If documentation is missing or incomplete
• If database performance is poor
• You need more hardware
• You haven’t implemented a service pack
• Your DBA is new to the job
• You have experienced an outage

Benefits of database health check-ups:

The benefits of database health check-ups are:

• Increase visibility across your database environment
• Get real-time alerts about critical events
• Maintain database health and stability
• Quickly diagnose issues
• Optimize database performance
• It improves interactions with client  

How to keep Your database healthy:

When business systems are running slowly or inconsistently, we need first to check the database. First, we need to find the database weakness. Some tips are given below to keep our database healthy.

• Perform regular backups:

With regular backups, you can secure your database from several potential disasters like software failure, hardware crashes, etc which can lead to sudden data loss by performing SQL fix operations.

• Regular verify SQL backups:

It's not enough to just back up your SQL Server database. You should double-check those backups regularly. This implies you must make sure your backups are both readable and accessible. There's a chance that your incremental backup will fail due to a server failure. The only thing that can save you, in this case, is the previously accessible backup.

• Monitoring Deadlocks

If several connections are attempting to read data at the same time, SQL Server may end up blocking or terminating the request of a few users. These are the users who are trapped in a deadlock. You may avoid deadlocks by using the application code.

• Check server health

You must also check the condition of your server in addition to the database. Even if your database is in perfect condition, what happens if the server fails? What would you do then? To avoid a situation like this, you should run server maintenance sessions regularly. Setting reminders can help with this.

And some reasons why our database health is not in good condition:

• Poor planning

Without proper planning and design, if we start, the database is health damaged which leads to hacking.

• Lack of systematic testing

Deep system testing is important for finding the quality, and the total environment.

• Lack of security patches and fixes

Databases are often targeted by hacker attacks and should be kept as well as protected as possible. This is not only for performance reasons, but also to prevent data loss and leakage. Many companies forget to patch and maintain their systems regularly, leaving their databases open to security attacks.

• Overuse of stored procedures

Some best database monitoring tools:

• Idera
• AimBetter
• Datadog database monitoring
• ManageEngine applications manager
• SentryOne SQL Sentry
• Spiceworks SQL Server Monitoring
• SQL Power Tools
• dbWatch
• Paesslerer PRTG Network monitor.

Which database health checks are there?

There are many health check-ups in the database. Some examples are given below:

• Configuration
• Alert log
• Storage
• Production
• Vulnerability assessment
• Performance
• Database on virtual machines.

Conclusion:

Databases are used for storing, maintaining, and accessing data. They collect information about people, places, or things. So we need to keep our database in good condition, and we keep safe from hackers.

Jayakumar Pannela |Associate Software Engineer