You may know, but recently we did a scheduled upgrade of our database server.  I wanted to provide a technical background on our recent upgrade and explain what that means to you as an end user.  As technical lead for Tablet Command and understanding the dependence of technology in emergency services, we strive for 100% uptime.  The database upgrade prevented us from meeting this, but we are planning our future architecture to accommodate for database upgrade too.

Background

A few days ago, we noticed our monitoring software complaining about database performance; it was nothing major, but it got our attention.  In fact, the degrade in performance was momentary, but it made us take a look at the root cause.  In researching the problem, we discovered that our database could be upgraded to the latest version.  This allows us to take advantage of some advanced geek features and improve performance.

Will this affect managing an incident?

No.  Tablet Command continues to run without connectivity.  If Tablet Command drops off the face of the earth, we are currently in two data centers on the west and east coast, if your CAD goes down, or if your communications center loses its network connection, Tablet Command will continue to run while you are managing an incident.  How is this possible?  Tablet Command was born as a stand-alone application for iOS - we designed it this way with fault tolerance in mind.

Will the Tablet Command API go down again?

We hope not.  In fact, we are disappointed that we had 15 minutes of downtime.  From the very beginning, one of my concerns is no single point of failure for the Tablet Command service.  With the database upgrade, it was currently unavoidable, but we see this as an opportunity to improve.  Our database resides in two data centers on a cluster of servers.