Basics of website database monitoring and backup

A database is a specialized storage designed, obviously, to store various data of a web application or website. Usually, a special DataBase Management System (DBMS) manages the databases. And a database system, or, for short, simply a database, includes all the data together with the DBMS, as well as all related applications.

The database management system that is the “brain” of any online store. Without this system, it is simply impossible to organize and manage a product catalog, shopping cart, payment systems, and even just register users. This means that it should work as stably and efficiently as possible.

Website database monitoring

Database monitoring is a vital part of the overall website monitoring routine. And you must do it properly and in a complex with all other monitoring tasks. With website stability monitoring and database monitoring at once. Thus it will be a hard task to do’ using conventional methods. To ease this, most webmasters use automated monitoring services like HostTracker.

This toolkit was designed to help webmasters in a lot of things. From basic accessibility monitoring and up to aforementioned database monitoring. And as an addition HostTracker utilizes a powerful instant notifications system to inform you about all occurring problems via various instant messengers.

How to set up database monitoring routines

HostTracker database monitoring feature allows you to run a query during each check and react accordingly to the result. It is also possible to check only the possibility of connecting to the database – ignoring the query field.

To set up database monitoring, fill in the connection data: database server address, port, database name, user login and password for connection. In addition, you must be sure to whitelist the HostTracker servers on your firewall or other blocking software to allow full access. You should make sure that you enter permanent addresses that you will change in the future.

This can be an arbitrary query – SELECT, UPDATE, DELETE, INSERT, execution of stored procedures (such as a scheduler), comparison of results, logical operations. The only limitation is the execution time – it should not take more than 30 seconds. Otherwise, the system will report an access timeout error.

Database backup basics

The main purpose of backup is to restore data after its loss. But in fact, backup allows you to solve at least three tasks that you cannot solve with using a replica. And you can’t initialize a replica without a backup.

Firstly, a backup copy allows you to restore data after a logical error. Secondly, modern DBMS are very reliable software systems, but occasionally there is damage to the internal structures of the database, after which access to the data disappears. Finally, the third task, the solution of which requires a backup copy, is cloning the database. For example, for testing purposes.

In the set of utilities attached to any DBMS, there are necessarily tools for uploading and downloading data. Backup systems store data either in a text format or in a binary format specific to a particular DBMS. The text format is good because users can create and edit it with external software. And binary, in turn, is good because it allows you to upload and download data faster by parallelizing the download and saving resources on format conversion.