The system works, mostly. It has slowed down so gradually that it’s hard to say when it started, and some errors come back every week. When someone asked whether the backups would restore, nobody could say for sure. It may be more than one system, too, with a database feeding a website or an accounts package that no one has ever mapped.
If you’re the person who ended up looking after it, a health check is the straightforward way to find out where you stand. CDE Systems reviews the whole setup remotely, whatever it’s built in, and restores the backups to see whether they’d really bring the data back. You get a written report saying what’s at risk and what to do about it, in order of priority.
It’s a fixed price, from £ 495 (+VAT). The report is yours to act on, file, or hand to another supplier. If you’re not sure it’s worth doing, a half-hour call first costs nothing.
When it’s worth doing
- No one has looked at it in any depth since it was built
- It has become slower or less predictable, and the cause isn’t obvious
- The backups run every night, but nobody has tried restoring one
- It came to you along with whatever state it was in
- Several systems pass data between them, and no one has the full picture
- An upgrade, a migration or a move to the cloud is coming up
- Someone has asked how you’d recover from a failure, and you’d like to know the answer first
Most systems that have run for years without a review have a few of these. It doesn’t mean anyone has done anything wrong.
How it fits together
On a mixed or bespoke setup, we start by working out what’s there. Where the data lives, what feeds what, and which parts the business would miss first if they stopped. That goes in the report as well, so the next person to look after it has somewhere to start.
We restore your backups
Most backup checks stop at the job log. A job that finishes every night proves the job ran. It says nothing about whether the data comes back, so we take a backup, restore it and check the data is complete.
On the way, we make sure every database is included, among them any added since the backup plan was written. We check integrity before the backup is taken, so corruption isn’t being copied every night. We check you could go back far enough to be useful. And we look for one copy kept where ransomware can’t reach it.
Database health check report and action plan
What else we look at
The list has been built up over many years of looking after clients’ systems, so it goes where trouble usually starts.
Who can get in. Accounts and permissions, including those that still belong to former staff. Service accounts, encryption, and whether anything is being audited. Every exposure is written down.
Errors that keep coming back. The same warnings logged every night, and the problems people have learned to work around.
Speed. Slow queries, indexing, blocking and locking, plus the hardware, server and network underneath. The findings are specific to your system.
Recovering from a failure. Most businesses can’t say how long it would take to get working again after a failure, or how much data they’d lose. You’ll have both figures, and a recovery plan that has been tested and written down.
Is it worth it if nothing seems wrong?
Often that’s the best time. A review in a quiet week costs a fixed price and a little of someone’s time. Finding out the backups don’t restore on the day you need them costs a great deal more.
And if the system is in good shape, the report will say so. That’s a useful thing to be able to show your manager, or an auditor.
What’s in the report
Sample database health check report
- A summary in plain English, written for whoever signs things off
- The technical findings in full, for whoever does the work, whether that’s your IT team, a support partner or a developer
- An action plan in order of priority:
Usually a backup that wouldn’t restore, or corruptionHighA real risk, but nothing is on fire todayRecommendedWorth doing and worth the cost, but not urgentOngoing maintenanceThings that should be happening routinely and aren’t
| Priority | What it means |
|---|---|
| Critical | Fix now. |
Where people go from here
- Nowhere. Some housekeeping, and the system carries on as it is.
- Someone to look after it. See database support.
- Work on what the report found, priced against the findings. For speed problems, see Access performance tuning or SQL Server performance tuning.
- A bigger change, such as an upgrade or new features. See modernise existing systems.
Once, or every so often
As a one-off, it’s a fixed-price review and a report, with nothing owed afterwards.
As part of a support arrangement, the check runs periodically. Drift, growth and new risks get picked up as they appear, so they don’t build up until the next crisis.
Something to send your manager
If you need sign-off, you can paste this into an email.
I’d like us to have an independent review of our database systems by CDE Systems, a database specialist working since 1999. It’s a fixed price of £495 (+VAT) and done remotely. They restore our backups to check they work, and tell us how long it would take to recover from a failure and how much data we’d lose. We’d get a plain-English summary, the technical findings and a prioritised list of actions. The report is ours, and there’s no obligation to use them afterwards.
Questions
We’re not sure what the system is built in. Stay on this page. That’s a common starting point, and finding out is part of the review. If you do know, the Access health check and the SQL Server health check go into more detail.
How do you get at the system? We connect by remote support while you watch, and you can end the session whenever you like. Nothing is left installed. Before we connect to a live system we need written authorisation, and an email is enough. More on remote support
Do we have to use you for the work? No. You can act on the report in-house, give it to your existing supplier, or file it.
Case Studies
Commercial Catering Service & Maintenance (field service)
Aire Valley Catering
Field service apps that work with no signal
Aire Valley Catering’s engineers work in commercial kitchens across the UK, often with no usable signal, and every job still has to be recorded. We built four production…
View case study
Transport and logistics
ACC Worldwide
A faster SQL Server system, noticed on day one
ACC Worldwide’s staff used one business system all day, every day, and it was slow. We worked on the SQL Server environment behind it. The speed-up was immediate,…
View case study
Travel and leisure (adventure travel and expeditions)
Jagged Globe
Keeping bookings, customer records and the website in step
Jagged Globe runs on an internal database and a booking website that have to agree every day, and sometimes they didn’t. We traced and fixed the transfers between…
View case study
Book a database health check £495 (+VAT)
Tell us what the system does, what it runs on if you know, and what’s worrying you, and we’ll arrange the review. Or ring first and talk it through. The first half hour is on us.