A lot of organisations run a critical system supplied by a vendor. The application is theirs, the database underneath is theirs to install, and somewhere along the way it became, by default, theirs to look after. Except it is not, really, and nobody quite agreed that it was.
So when you ask, is our database healthy and recoverable, the answer comes back: the vendor handles that. And the vendor, asked the same question, says: we support the application, the database is the customer’s environment. In the gap between those two answers, nobody is actually watching the database your whole operation depends on.
This is not anyone behaving badly. It is a handoff that was never written down. The vendor installs to a working state and moves on. They are not your DBA, they never agreed to be, and they have no view of your backups, your patching, or your recovery position. Their job was the software. The database was assumed.
When you say the vendor handles the database, have you ever seen, in writing, exactly what they monitor, back up, and would restore, and how fast? If not, you may be relying on a responsibility that nobody has actually accepted.
We run a free, read-only check that tells you the real state of those vendor-supplied databases, independent of who was assumed to be watching them. And if one of those assumptions has already bitten, we pick up exactly there. Assumptions are comfortable right up until the day you test one.
Tell us what is going on. A senior DBA reads every message and points you at the right next step, even when that is not us. A free read-only check will tell you whether this one is sitting in your estate.
Get pointed in the right direction