If MySQL is your database platform of choice, End Point can help in many ways. We have deep familiarity with multiple facets of MySQL and its relatives, Percona and MariaDB. This starts with sensible installation and management, which we can provide through custom packages and maintenance, and continues through sensible configuration tuning. We can help work through production issues or slowdowns and help you get the best performance from your existing cluster, or help you work on expanding your existing application to function with multiple servers as well.
There are multiple aspects that need to be considered in order to get peak performance from your database servers. We’ll be glad to analyze your specific situation and identify solutions for common performance issues. This can include tuning adjustments, additional schema-level changes, or alternate approaches to the specific queries you’re looking at. Sometimes something as simple as adding a proper index can have an enormous performance impact. We can also help you scale out using MySQL’s built-in replication and identify particular bottlenecks or issues which might be affecting an existing installation.
Over the years End Point has supported and administered hundreds of MySQL databases, including a number with massive amounts of data. Our database developers and DBAs are passionate about helping our customers get the most out of their MySQL databases and with making sure they are securely managed.
Microsoft SQL Server is a market-leading proprietary relational database. It is a mature RDBMS, which offers some of the most advanced administrative and developer tools. And, recent versions include powerful clustering options.
End Point provides experienced Microsoft SQL Server support for our clients with small and large deployments. Whether your deployments are on-site, hosted, or in the clouds, we make ourselves available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Whether your MS SQL is onsite, at Amazon’s AWS, or Microsoft’s Azure, our engineers can see to its health around the clock. We’re expert at performance tuning, backup and restoration, database migration, high availability, and disaster recovery.
We support trading platforms, ecommerce sites, specialized data-processing systems, data warehouses, and custom applications backed by MS SQL Server. Database security is a function of smart design and vigilant administration.
We’re equally experienced developing new applications and administering existing SQL Server instances. Cumulatively, End Point has decades of experience in SQL Server development. We regularly use SQL Server for new deployments and our developers have a formal methodological approach to database design.
Replication is, simply put, copying data from one place to another. Whether you use PostgreSQL, MySQL, or SQL Serverfor your database system, there are multiple solutions to consider, both built-in and with third-party tools. PostgreSQL includes these capabilities with several built-in replication features such as write-ahead log (WAL) shipping, warm and hot standby, and streaming replication. Some widely-used third-party tools for replication and similar functions include Bucardo(developed by End Point), Slony, Londiste, pgbouncer, and pgpool. MySQL also has built-in replication features for shipping either row data or SQL commands, and can be used in conjunction with other third-party tools.
Each tool has its own strengths and constraints. End Point’s consultants have experience determining the tools that work best in various situations and helping you achieve the right balance between cost, availability, and performance.
Growing businesses often reach a point where their database systems slow unacceptably under increasingly high demand. Replication allows you to create copies, known as slaves or replicas, of your main databases. These replicas can then take some of the load from reporting jobs and other read-only activities. Bucardo and Slony are popular replication solutions that can support this arrangement. PostgreSQL version 9.0 and newer also provide a read-only replica option with its “hot standby” feature. End Point can help you determine which of these solutions will be best for you and your business.
Bucardo also offers two-way replication such that two databases can be complete authoritative repositories of all information, updated in near real-time. This can be achieved across multiple datacenters for risk mitigation, lower latency to local services, or to distribute load. We can help you avoid pitfalls and make the most of a multi-master replication system.
There are many ways to back up a database. The most common PostgreSQL backup utility, pg_dump, is simple and easy to use, but can add load to your production system. Some workloads benefit from replicating data to a slave database and exporting that periodically instead. We have experience with other backup solutions such as point-in-time recovery (PITR) and filesystem snapshots, and can create a solution suited to your needs.
Businesses have always collected data; many businesses now want to “mine” or analyze their data for marketing, performance, and process optimization purposes. This usually involves very complex queries, which can be expensive both in time and server processing power. A common approach is to periodically transfer the data from production databases into a “data warehouse” to simplify the queries and ease load on the main database servers, in a process known as “Extraction, Transformation, and Loading”, or ETL. Bucardo allows seamless transformation of data between master and replica, and can handle ETL processes in a single package.
Sometimes businesses or applications need to distribute changes across long distances or delayed over time. In these scenarios latency and disruptions to connectivity can affect replication in unexpected ways. End Point engineers are versed in the options, and can help you build a solution that will handle your more complex needs.
Like all software, older versions of PostgreSQL and MySQL eventually reach end-of-life status and are no longer supported. Your applications may need updates to be compatible with newer database versions. A continuing upgrade plan is important for any system, and End Point engineers can help you plan and execute a smooth PostgreSQL or MySQL upgrade. We also help our clients with those periodic, and always important, security and bug fix releases.
End Point can build custom PostgreSQL and MySQL packages to suit any special needs you may have. The most popular open source operating systems include standard PostgreSQL and MySQL packages that are suitable for most situations. However, some of our clients have needed a custom-built database with different compile options, linking against special versions of 3rd-party software (Perl, Python, PHP, etc.), including modifications developed locally or by the community, or to install to a nonstandard location. At End Point we have supported our clients’ needs with specialized PostgreSQL RPM packages deployed via Yum repositories, taking the pain out of custom database deployment.
The emergence of Unicode as the new standard for character set encoding has simplified storing, processing, and exchanging data between systems. But getting your systems migrated from legacy encodings to Unicode can be a challenge. In PostgreSQL and MySQL, storing text in the Unicode UTF-8 encoding ensures that each character is valid. But this can introduce problems when your database or application raise new errors about invalid data being submitted. End Point has years of experience dealing with the transition from legacy encodings to UTF-8 and getting your applications and databases to the Unicode promised land.
Many businesses are moving away from more expensive or less capable database systems to PostgreSQL. Although the SQL standard provides some consistency between databases, migrating from one system to another is rarely a straightforward process.
End Point engineers are well-versed in both modern and older database management systems, whether proprietary or open source. We have experience navigating the complexities that arise during these migrations, and can help you move to the world’s most advanced open source database quickly and with a minimum of interruption to your business.
Even with the best hardware on the market, things can go wrong. You may have state-of-the-art servers with redundant power supplies, multiple network interfaces, and multi-path disk controllers in front of a high-speed SAN, but fire, lightning strike, theft, and other disasters are risks that can take a critical database server offline and cause your business to grind to a halt.
End Point can spearhead your recovery. We can help you rebuild on new servers, whether your own or leased dedicated servers. We’ll recreate your PostgreSQL or MySQL setup, restore the data from your backup, and set up any security, special configuration, and other software needed to get your database services working again.
End Point has a team of premier database engineers that have seen a wide variety of implementations and businesses cases. Our on-site support can include training for your team, internal architecture review, and consultations to meet your specific needs.
Is your DBA team new to PostgreSQL? Do you want to get training and consulting for your entire team on PostgreSQL replication and tuning? We’ve got the experience that counts here and can get your team ready in about a week of on-site work.
Our on-site support is not cookie-cutter and is always tailored to meet your needs.
In addition to training, we also offer audits of your existing infrastructure:
· Suggested changes to the postgresql.conf configuration settings. This is key for properly handling your system resources in a way that provides the highest utilization and best performance overall.
· Suggested changes to any system-level kernel configuration. This can include specific advice for filesystem tuning, memory parameters, and hardware tuning to give you maximum performance.
· Review of the I/O systems and suggestions for any weaknesses identified.
· Suggestions for database redundancy and analysis of any current replication systems.
· Suggestions about connection pooling and other database scaling issues.
· Review of the backup system and available options for providing incremental backups, specially related to production deployments and rollback scenarios.
· Review of performance-impacting features, such as indexes: which are currently used, which are unneeded, and which should be added.
· Analysis of typical queries used on your database system. This includes gathering and identifying the highest-impact queries. We also provide suggestions for improvements on specific queries, such as indexes, query restructuring, or additional database tuning suggestions.
· Review/critique of any data loading processes and suggestions for improvement in any bulk-loading scenarios.
· Review authorization, security, any current access control methods, and how they could be improved.
· Review and analyze any procedural code in your database.
· Review partitioning setup for large tables.
· Suggestions for tools to analyze database growth, handle monitoring, perform your own query and performance review.
· Identification of other possible pain points.
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