bsheets 73864 (1/7/2011)
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.
I think it would depend on whether or not the system is customer facing and revenue generating. If it is, I can't imagine any business-minded executive choosing to forego future revenue so the system can come up clean. Sure it would be nice if it did, but if it didn't that's fine too b/c it can be fixed. That's what we as DBA's get paid to do. I don't think anyone will be concerned about the number of support calls either. That's what CS gets paid to do and it's not revenue impacting so no biggie. In the end, like most business decisions, it's about the almighty dollar. Maximizing revenue and minimizing loss. The amount of work it causes you or I or customer service is irrelevant. For some service oriented companies there are SLA's that state for any and all downtime the service provider will share in the revenue loss with their customers. I worked for a financial company that had such a clause. As expected, uptime was their highest priority :-).