SQLArcher (1/7/2011)
Hi,It depends on the nature of the system. I work in a financial institute with a lot of trading; in a downtime vs. partial data loss situation business has to weigh the cost of being down until the data is recovered, risk of reputational loss and increased revenue loss against a smaller risk of reputational loss and less loss of revenue with partial data.
In most cases (in this scenario) it would be better to accept a partial data loss until it can be recovered, and get business up and running to mitigate the additional reputational and financial loss.
I also work in financial services, and I would disagree with this assessment. Having some customers log in and have missing transactions would be worse than keeping everyone offline until all the data is restored - imagine the number of support calls from customers with missing transaction data.
Also, trying to merge the missing data with a database that has had numerous changes since returning to an online state could be problematic, and could result in duplicate key issues.
Unless it was static historical data that is missing, staying offline until all is recovered would be better.