The Importance of Maintaining Data Integrity and Availability In FileMaker Pro Databases
By:
Steven H. Blackwell
Platinum Member, FileMaker Business Alliance
FileMaker 8 Certified Developer
FileMaker 7 Certified Developer
Comprehensive, real-time maintenance of data integrity and data availability in FileMaker Pro databases is an on-going and significant challenge for business owners, database developers, database administrators (DBA’s), and IS/IT managers in organizations of all types and sizes. Whether you are a government agency in the health care field, an airline maintenance department, a small business providing commercial dish-washing facilities for the food services industry, a business trade association or professional society, or a small dry-cleaning business contractor on a military base, you have to be able to rely on the fact that your data will be available when needed and that those data are accurate and complete.
Like the Dark Force from some science fiction movie, there are a host of elements that ceaselessly conspire to attack the availability and integrity of your data day in and day out. And hovering over many database installations are also a myriad of regulatory requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley, the European Union’s Basel II, HIPAA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), and the Buckley Act—to name just a few.
What can go wrong? And given that accidents can happen even in the best-regulated of households, when things do go wrong, how can DBA’s and IS/IT people fix them? And given that in many small businesses the business owner is the DBA and lacks formal DBA or IS/IT training, how does that business owner recover from what could be a disaster?
In this paper I will detail a number of errors and events that can occur. I will also explain some concepts for addressing, mitigating, and even reversing those errors. I will focus particularly on the difficult issues of deletion management, of backup reconciliation, both roll-back and roll-forward, and of regulatory compliance.
To read the rest of this article, http://fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/187893/
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