Data Integrity And Availability Management in Business Critical Environments

[blurb]FileMaker Pro databases deployed by FileMaker Server are increasingly being used to support the business-critical operations of work groups in large enterprises, of distributed multiple off-site office locations, and of entire organizations as well. These files are often complex and large in the multi Gigabyte range. Often individual tables can contain millions of records. Such systems are increasingly moving into the domain of what was once thought of as “Big Iron” systems, but frequently they employ none of the protections traditionally found with such “Big Iron” systems.

Business owners with large amounts of mission-critical information stored in FileMaker Pro databases are faced with multiple, complex challenges and responsibilities in seeking to preserve both the integrity and the availability of their business data. Their IT managers and database administrators as well as their developers must constantly focus on this key item as well.

Lulled into a sense of complacency by partial solutions such as backups, they all come to realize only after a significant data loss that restoration of critical data is a major undertaking and responsibility they have overlooked. Preservation of data integrity and preservation of data availability, along with preservation of data confidentiality, are the three core elements of any professionally designed security program.

The challenges to meeting these requirements take unexpected routes much of the time. Administrators frequently need to restore data through multiple levels of Undo and Redo. They must also reconcile multiple versions of past backups with different timestamps and datasets to the actual current work-flow state that has happened since the last backup. Both such requirements present unique challenges.

(continue reading to download a PDF white paper)

[/blurb]

fmDG2.pdf