March 13, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Is depends on the meaning of downtime. If you look at if from the user point of view of not people not being able to do their jobs and make money for the company, then I would say that most of our downtime is caused by application issues:
Stored proc updating a table and blocking 300 users for a couple of hours at the peak busy time.
Overnight DTS package job failing to complete and leaving the database not ready for business users at start of day.
Production application with a connection string pointing at a database on a development server, so all users could not log in after we shutdown an old development server.
Purge stored procedure had logic in the where clause wrong so it deleted only the data that was needed and left only the unneeded data.
Application running queries in a loop that was supposed to refresh every 5 minutes, but was running 1000 times per second and making SQL Server unresponsive
etc.
Of course we have hardware and network related problems, but developers are the ones we depend on to create the really big screw-ups.
March 13, 2009 at 12:43 pm
Michael Valentine Jones (3/13/2009)
Is depends on the meaning of downtime.
I take "downtime" to mean anything which prevents normal operation in any link of the chain supporting that operation, be it software, data, process, hardware, network, internet, 3rd party, power, etc.
It also has lesser severity levels in partial, decreased, delayed, etc.
An operational specification or expectation should specify the limitations, usually governed somewhere close to the level of patience and stress the end users and or business will accomodate, which varies between markets and types of business.
For example, MyFamily.com could probably go down for a couple of days and not lose many customers. But a trading company would probably not out-live the same... the latter threshold is measured in milliseconds and seconds, not hours or days.
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