Many websites run database-driven applications, and a single missing entry in these tables can lead to website downtime. Database corruption is an alarming scenario for webhosts, who end up spending time and effort repairing and restoring their customer databases.

At Bobcares, our staff resolve such scenarios everyday in their role as Outsourced Support Engineers for web hosting providers. And we’ve learned that its better to stay pro-active and prevent a DB corruption, than fire-fighting a website downtime.

In our Sr. Support Engineer Hamish’s words, “Database corruptions are often unpredictable. A single unforeseen event such as a server reboot can tamper with valuable customer data. But with our proactive database monitoring and management system, we promptly fix all database corruptions in our customers’ servers.”

Today, we’ll see what causes database corruption and how we protect our customers’ servers from that.

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What causes database corruption in SQL servers?

Our years of practical experience in debugging corrupt databases in customer servers has helped us tackle a variety of causes for database corruption.

1. Power outages – Abrupt loss of power to the server or a server reboot can disrupt the running processes and cause active databases to get corrupted.
2. Hard disk errors – Bad sectors in hard disks, file system errors, lack of adequate disk space, all these can lead to data corruptions in the server.
3. SQL server restart – Database servers need restart following upgrades, maintenance or management. But if these restarts are not planned well, they can mess up the open database tables.
4. Huge size of databases – Over time and usage, the size of databases in the server can increase, which can cause them to be easily corrupted and unmanageable.
5. Outdated SQL server – A MySQL version that is outdated, vulnerable or not tweaked properly for optimal performance, can often crash and cause data corruption.
6. Improper queries – Many websites have custom software applications, and some of them can contain unoptimized queries or denormalized databases, which can corrupt these data.

Bobcares Support Engineer Dileep explains, “The reason for database corruption may vary with server and knowing the actual cause is vital to prevent it. Upon repairing the DB, we promptly debug the server logs and SQL history. This helps us to pinpoint the reason behind the corruption and to implement the best corrective action suited for that server.”

Resolving database corruption in servers

The immediate fix for corrupt databases is to repair them without losing time. Users can check and repair a specific database table from their cPanel or PhpMyadmin.

Repair corrupted database table from Phpmyadmin

Server owners often attempt to repair databases from the WHM, but these actions usually provide only a temporary relief.

Repair corrupt database from WHM

A major issue we’ve noted in these cases is that, most often server owners miss out on the big picture view while repairing the databases. If the magnitude of database corruption is high and the recurrence is too much, it may denote a more serious issue.

That’s why we always inspect the cause and depth of the database corruption without relying on such band-aid solutions alone. This enables our 24/7 dedicated support engineers to help webhosts implement proactive measures to prevent such issues.

Hamish alerts, “SQL DB repair may not be successful always, or it may happen that some databases get corrupt on a regular basis. If ignored, these recurrent data corruptions can eventually lead to data loss or downtime. To tackle that, we do further investigations, take proper precautions, perform restorations or even recreate the databases, as required.”

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How we prevent database corruption in servers

At Bobcares, our expert Outsourced Support Engineers for web hosting providers perform these tasks for our customers to save their servers from losing valuable data.

“A set of planned preventive management tasks such as service optimization, DB monitoring, etc. can prevent a critical database corruption.”, says Dileep. “At Bobcares, we follow these 10 best practices Bobcares to protect our customers’ server data.”

1. Maintaining regular backups – We assist webhosts to maintain regular backups of their servers to ensure business continuity, and monitor them for adequacy and completeness. These backups come handy when we require restoring the databases, that are beyond repair, to prevent a website downtime.
2. Query optimization – With the help of our monitoring scripts, we identify the slow and nested queries that are taking up more resources, and get the queries optimized and redesigned to stabilize the SQL server.
3. Periodic check and repairs of DB – As a proactive measure, we have custom cron jobs set at off-peak hours, to periodically inspect and repair corrupt databases in the server, to ensure high website uptime.
4. Proper shut-down and restart of services – We avoid SQL servers from restarting abruptly, by doing regular planned maintenance and monitoring the connections and users to prevent a server abuse.
5. Keeping SQL server optimized and updated – By tuning SQL servers for high performance, limiting the connections and enabling persistent connections, we avoid database table corruptions. Along with periodic configuration tweaking, we also keep the server updated to the latest stable version to avoid an exploit.
6. Compact database file sizes – We’ve noted that, over time and usage, databases tend to grow in size. To avoid the huge sized databases from getting corrupt, we adopt strategies such as splitting the databases or truncating them, based on the application.
7. Database normalization – A good database design with adequate normalization is indispensable for growing websites to maintain speed and performance and to avoid data loss. Our add-on expertise in development services helps us to guide our customers to design web applications that do not tamper with data integrity.
8. Hardware maintenance – Examining the server logs for any hardware related errors or kernel bugs, SMART tests to avoid hard disk failures, memory inspections, network latency monitoring, etc. are a part of our preventive maintenance service, which helps to proactively track and fix all related issues.
9. Scan servers for virus and malware – Viruses or malware can get into servers via various sources such as an insecure user PC or a malicious attack. With our periodic scanning and auditing activities, we are able to weed them off promptly and secure the servers to make them immune to all hacks.
10. Disk space management – Maintaining adequate disk space in the servers is vital for its smooth functioning and to prevent a database corruption. As a part of our 24/7 support services, we monitor the disk space usage in customer servers and when the available space reduces below ideal value, our engineers jump in and free up space.

Bobcares engineers help online businesses of all sizes achieve world-class security and uptime, using tried and tested solutions. If you’d like to know how to make your server more reliable, we’d be happy to talk to you.

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