Is Your Postgres Support Failing You? Here Are 6 Signs It Might Be

Postgres has established itself as the database for modern businesses—the most well-loved and advanced open source database on the market. But even the best databases experience issues. Business-critical systems need and deserve business-critical support—offerings designed to help you both stay online and ensure customer satisfaction. Unfortunately, not all support is created equal, and different support models can produce vastly different outcomes.

If your Postgres database support is not being handled by cost-effective experts, you risk avoidable downtime, unnecessary outages, loss of revenue and diminished reputation.

So how do you know you’re at risk before you start experiencing consequences? Look out for these 6 telltale signs!

Identify support gaps before they become database disasters

Postgres support is complicated and dynamic—it needs to evolve with your infrastructure and your business priorities. While this means that everyone’s database support apparatus might look a little different, we believe that there are foundational capabilities that every organization should be able to rely on, as well as common indicators that your architecture isn’t quite as sturdy as it needs to be:
 

• You experience unplanned downtime and frequent performance issues: No one likes to have a business-critical system go down unexpectedly, but downtime is more than just an inconvenience. For a $500 million dollar company, just one hour of downtime translates to $57,000 in lost revenue! Not to mention potential damage to your reputation.
• When problems arise, they take too long to fix: Sometimes problems simply can’t be avoided. In these cases, the question becomes: since you’re going to have database problems, how quickly can you recover? Searching the internet or hoping that you get a timely reply is pretty optimistic if your business depends on getting back online.
• You can’t find or afford Postgres DBAs: With the popularity of Postgres, qualified Postgres DBAs are difficult to find and expensive if you do.  But don’t rely on DBAs who aren't Postgres experts, they’re less likely to be able to respond to Postgres-specific challenges effectively in a timely manner.
• You’re constantly stretching your budget to the breaking point: Do-it-Yourself (DIY) is a time honored method of reducing costs, but does it always pay off? Unless you have the expertise and manpower to maintain and monitor your Postgres estate 24/7, the DIY approach is likely costing you more than it’s saving you.
• You’ve had to sideline strategic initiatives: You can only accomplish transformation projects if your teams have bandwidth. Unfortunately, many companies see their ambitions fall by the wayside as their DBA teams focus on tedious maintenance and putting out fires.
• You’ve accepted self-support, despite the drawbacks: Maintaining your Postgres database and resolving issues quickly adds up in terms of cost and resources—a consequence of the risky self-support model. You risk failing to meet your SLAs, the expectations of your customers.

Get robust, comprehensive support 24/7…without breaking the bank

So, what’s the solution? Independent technical support services and operational staff augmentation can help businesses of all sizes fill the gaps in their support infrastructure and embark on a new journey with reduced risk, lower costs and a focus on what matters most to their business. 

Offerings like EDB’s Remote DBA Service (RDBA) helps businesses of all sizes complete or expand their support team when expert, certified Postgres DBAs can’t be found or are too expensive to afford. Plus RDBA offers 24/7 monitoring of your systems so issues can be resolved before problems actually occur. Technical Support like EDB Community 360 offers 24/7 Follow-the-Sun for Severity-1 and 2 issues, with response times as quick as 15 minutes for critical issues. Leveraging Postgres experts is a much more efficient and cost-effective approach than self-support to get the Postgres expertise and coverage you need while enabling the reallocation of current resources to more strategic projects. 

Your support strategy can make or break your business, so it’s not something you can risk taking for granted. If you’re struggling to reduce risk and improve uptime and performance, or implement strategic initiatives like AI and modernizing defense tools, EDB Community 360 and EDB Remote DBA Service could be just the tools for you.

Want to learn more? Check out our webinar and the accompanying eBook, “6 Telltale Signs It’s Time to Rethink Your Postgres Support.”