Blog : The Facts You Should Know About Maintaining Our Database

Like any other element of our online virtual store, the database requires proper maintenance and continuous updating. In this sense, there are some basic maintenance tasks that we should not neglect. Add and remove records when data changes.

In the case of a product catalog database, it will be necessary to add new records as new goods are acquired and remove records as some items stop selling. Make changes to the information stored in our database. Sometimes we will have to change the description of a product, such as its price.

Maintaining our database may also include other tasks, such as reviewing log files, monitoring server performance, and verifying that our hard drive is not overloaded. These tasks, similar to those necessary to maintain a web server, will require the participation of a person well versed in database management.

So we should not tear our clothes when looking for a qualified professional to handle these issues, as waiting for a problem to occur could be fatal. In this sense, it should be noted that maintaining our database will avoid unexpected downtime and poor performance of our online virtual store.

We must ensure that our database is backed up regularly (in addition to another backup of the rest of our website). Needless to remember, we should not wait for our database to stop working to check if the backups are good. For this reason, we should test them from time to time, randomly selecting a file or table from the database and restoring it from the backup.

When restoring a file to verify that the backup is working properly, we should not overwrite the active database, as if the backup data turns out to be bad, we would have caused the same situation we were trying to avoid.

Instead of this operation, we must restore the data on our test server and verify it in that same place. In this sense, seeing something restored from the backup is the only way to be sure that the data is being protected.