Improving the underlying storages of our database environment
Due to a major database restructuring, e-conomic will be unavailable for shorter periods at nighttime over the next week. In addition, we are planning a longer downtime of up to 20 hours on 1-2 April (the Easter holidays Holy Thursday/Good Friday).
In our continuous effort to improve the overall performance of the e-conomic application, we will be initiating a major restructuring of data over the next week. In other words, we are moving customer data files to faster SAN volumes.
The division of data into smaller volumes will eventually spread the load on our system, resulting in a more stable application performance on an overall basis.
The nightly downtime periods will be conducted as follows: March 19-23 between 00.00 and 05.00 am CET. If you are logged on during this timeframe, you will experience that some requests time out. We therefore recommend that you avoid logging on to e-conomic during this time frame.
Downtime overview
On 01-02 April, we’re expecting e-conomic to be unavailable from 10 pm CET on 01 April to 6 pm CET on 02 April for data file compression. You will not be able to log on to e-conomic during this period. Should we be able to restore service before 6 pm on 02 April, we will of course notify you instantly here on the blog.
We deeply regret the inconvenience and look forward to introducing you to a faster e-conomic.
Moving database files is a manual process, requiring interaction from the e-conomic database team every night during this week.
Are you seriously taking down an ERP for 20 hours? In a non-weekend?
While it’s holiday season in Denmark, the world isn’t entirely Christian and I think this is a huge mistake for a SaaS trying to be international.
Not only is 20 hours of downtime for a SaaS provider a weird thing [that’s 0.2% downtime on a year basis!], but doing this outside a weekend seems like an odd decision – especially as you promote your APIs for people – like us – building stores on E-conomic.
This basically means that we can’t process orders for 20 hours in a row, as we’re unable to generate invoices, hence not allowed to charge money (at least from Danish legislation).
And this without any direct e-mails to customers warning about the downtime (at least we haven’t been given any warning) – why?
I love e-conomic, but I think this is nuts.
Duh – this must of course be an April fool. Can’t believe you got me 🙂
Dear Hartvig,
I really wish this was an April’s fool joke (although I think we could have come up with something slightly funnier than a downtime warning:)), but it is in fact the ugly truth.
We have scheduled the application downtime for the Easter holidays beginning at 10 pm on Maundy Thursday, which is a bank holiday in some countries, and lasting until 6 pm on Good Friday, which is a bank holiday in most of the Christian world – in fact in all the countries that e-conomic is currently represented in.
In this way, we believe that the downtime becomes less of an inconvenience to the average e-conomic user.
As a SaaS provider, we have to update our platform now and them to improve our performance. We deeply regret the impacts of the scheduled downtime on the operation of your API integration.
The downtime is scheduled to a maximum of 20 hours to allow for testing of application performance for regular users as well as for API users, before we restore service.
I do agree with you that the downtime notification was submitted with rather short notice. We have recently included this information in newsletters as well as on the log-in pages of our websites, but based on your feedback, we will try to reach even more users through other communication channels.
Should we be able to restore service earlier than expected, we will of course notify you here on the blog.