Blog from the Top -- What keeps you up at night? Sleep better with Continuent!

Database Administration is a tough, often ungrateful job. Especially if you run a 24/7 business-critical MySQL or MariaDB deployment.

MySQL has proven to be a remarkably solid database which supports billions of dollars in revenue. On some level this very solidity creates a false sense of security. There are many things that can wrong at any given time, whether that is a change to your app, a bug in the database, hardware failure or just simply running out of disk space.

Percona recently conducted a poll: “What keeps you up at night?”

Not surprisingly, "Downtime/HA" is very high on the list.

While there are many challenging issues and tasks that a DBA must deal with day-in and day-out, the one thing that always gets the Management team’s attention is Service Down, along with the loss of the revenue caused by the outage.

DBA's should ask two questions: "How much do you value your own sleep?" and "How much revenue does your company lose if the service is down for 30 minutes?"

While the first one may be personally more important for the DBA, the real question is the latter. Often the downtime is even longer than 30 minutes, which leads to a large, immediate revenue loss combined with longer-term revenue losses when your customers depart due to frustration. Such situations tend to put a DBA's job at risk.

Continuent, The MySQL Availability Company, has always been about data availability and continuous operations, offering superb, extraordinarily fast, customer service by highly knowledgeable database experts - during the last 18 months our average response time on urgent support requests has been less than three (3) minutes.

Stop and think about that for a second. Some of the world’s best MySQL database engineers are available to you within minutes of notice. That alone should make you feel and sleep better.

Combine that with Tungsten Clustering, the proven MySQL clustering solution for High Availability, Disaster Recovery, multi-master and geographically distributed deployments, and you really could sleep like a baby. Just ask some of our customers who have deployed thousands of clustered MySQL and MariaDB databases worldwide, on-premises and in the cloud.

Smooth sailing,
Eero Teerikorpi, Founder and CEO of Continuent