DB Audits - unhappy customers

[BCS]

Some background: Customer relies heavily on SQL DBs to run the site. Originally used MS-SQL but the size was very big. Moved to mySQL and everything was working fine until a few days ago. Suddenly errors causing almost the entire site to crash. Customer reported problems with their database and we submitted ticket #18818 regarding it.

We wrote with (including connection strings and DB details):

Customer has had repeated mySQL outages since 10/25. This has involved inability to access databases from periods of 15 minutes to 1 hour.

Please advise why this is happening and when it will be resolved. Need something to assure customer that problem will be fixed soon.

Support replied back with:
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A: Hello,
i have flushed the hosts. Everything shoul dbe ok now. If not please included a link so that we can test this further.
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Needless to say, it wasn't. Customer could not access DBs and then spent 6 hours moving data over to MS-SQL to keep their site up and running.

At this point their site was effectively down for over 24 hours and they contacted us again about the problems. Since support never told us what the problem was (as we requested) we really had nothing to tell them and again re-opened the ticket.

We then get the reply:
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A: Hello,
The database is back on-line I am sorry for the confusion. We were auditing the databases and didn't realize that yes was supposed to be in use. I apologize for this inconvenience. Everything should be working properly now.
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So here's how it stands ...

Our customer's mySQL DB goes down for an unknown reason. They spend 6 hours trying to get it up and running and then moving it to MS-SQL. Come to find out they had actually had been wasting their time because someone at the Vortech end took some action that locked them out - basically disabling the site.

How do I answer/respond back to this customer? Do I simply say "oops, sorry"? These are rhetorical questions ... maybe we can save the account, but this just adds to the PSoft problems that were to be resolved at the end of last month.

We're sure to hear back from the customer (if they haven't cancelled by now) as to, "Everything should be working properly now."

Trying to come up with something constructive with this post, but really at a loss. Maybe Vortech/Matrixreseller can implement something internally that would prevent this in the future.

Here is what happened.
The ticket was submitted that you had been having problems and asked to look into it. Before that had been completed the ticket was updated with error messages stating that mysql had locked out that Ip and the hosts needed to be flushed in mysql. I flushed the host entries and asked for confirmation that the client was able to access the database. I also asked for a link if the client was unable to access the database so that we could trouble shoot further. All of this was on MySQL.

The client did not respond to the ticket at all.

That night an audit was done on the MS-SQL server. The database was marked as suspect because we had been having problems with hsphere not deleting databases correctly and it seemed that this database was not in use.

We then received a response that the client moved everything over to MS-SQL and the database was not accessable. We made the database accessable again and everything was fixed.

We still have not received anythign from the client about mysql and if that problem was fixed by flushing the hosts. Nor have we received a link to test the mysql databases. We did receive a link to test the MS-SQl databases and those have been fixed.

I do apologize for the confusion.

[admin]

Also just anther note on this, mySQL looked fine ever time. For some reason mySQL blocked you from getting to the server. Ether to many errors or hammering ths erver some how.

As for the msSQL DB's that was my fault. We needed to clean up the server as H-Sphere had not been deleteing the DB's like it should. So we just took them off line to make sure we did not fully mess any one up by removing them in trying to clean up the system.