SQL Assessment Process Breakdown

Transcription of Video:

Hi, I’m Steve Stedman, with Stedman Solutions, LLC. And one of the things that I wanted to do today was to answer some questions around what we do with a SQL Server health assessment. The screen you’re looking at here is the Stedman solutions, services page on our website. And if we scroll down to the database health assessment, we’ll take a look at some details here.

So there’s really two kinds of health assessments. One is the straight health your SQL Servers, make sure it’s performing fine, but we want to go look at the health of the SQL Server and make sure that it’s stable, it’s solid, it’s going to be there when you need it. If you have a failure, it’s we want to make sure that things are good. So it’ll be covered, if good backup, stuff like that. The second half of that is a performance assessment, and a performance assessment, or health and performance assessment is where we come in. And we focus on specific performance problems, I spent a little bit more time on the performance, like focusing on where the what queries are slow, or what parts of the system are slow figuring out why they’re slow. Sometimes we come back with, here’s a query that needs some work, or here’s a stored procedure that’s causing problems. Sometimes we come back with some indexes, sometimes we are able to fix the performance with different server settings, things like that.

The assessment and there’s two types of outcome on here. One is where we just do the assessment. And we present the information to you and your team, where you have all the details, so you can go fix it and resolve it. The other is where we do the remediation, where we’ll do the assessment, and then we’ll come back with, over maybe a week to two week time period, we’re gonna go and make all the changes we can on the server based off of what our recommendations are there. That’s usually the most comprehensive one where we’re doing the remediation work.

The way it works, and this may vary a little bit depending on how many servers were doing for you at a time. But if we’re doing one server, it’s usually about a two and a half to three week process. For doing more servers, it adds a little bit more time there. But the first step is a project kickoff call once we get access to the system, this is where we confirm we’ve got the right servers, we’ve got the right access, we have everything we need. And then we establish baseline monitoring. And we do that with Database Health Monitor. Put a few tools on there to track blocking queries track what’s going on to track weights to track things like that. So that we can see what the basic health of your server is. That’s standard part of Database Health Monitor puts a very light load on the server to track all of that, we’re usually able to with what we find, get back more than what the load is we add with that kind of thing that if your servers running in like 95% CPU, we might want to only turn that on for a little bit. But if you’re running it like normal CPU levels, maybe down 50 60 or less, no worries, putting that on there. That’s us many server locations, we establish the baseline, and then we take some time to dig into it and figure out well, what’s going on.

So after the database health monitor has been running for three to six days. And it’s tracking information we go in and we analyze that and we figure out okay, what are the things here that are really important? What are the things that are needed, in order to get the server into shape, either performance wise, or overall health wise, we come back with a presentation at that point and say, here’s what we think should be changed. If we’re doing the remediation, you always have the choice of whether you want us to do it or not. We can just go through every item in the list, we give you all the details on you can decide, “yes, I’ll take that” or “I won’t take that one”, and so on going through the list, and we make sure it’s all good. And then we go and we take about a week to do all those changes. Sometimes, say a week, sometimes a little bit longer. If there’s something like you need SQL server updates, we may need to schedule that in a weekend or off hour period for you.

Then we have our final presentation when it’s all done that says this is everything we did. This is what we told you we were going to do. This is what we found along the way. And these are the results. The end of that your server is in good shape.

So some of the things that we really want to focus on here is making sure that there aren’t any issues or flaws in your SQL Server setup. Now, we know in reality, a lot of SQL servers aren’t set up by DBAs have a lot of experience. They’re just set up by someone who got thrown into that position of configuring that SQL Server. And a lot of the time we find that, well maybe backups aren’t being done right or you’re not doing the right maintenance or you’re not doing check_db to check for corruption, things like that. We find the problems but we just don’t We don’t just find them but we find them we teach you about them why they’re important and then we help you go fix them. We go through lots of different best practices from maintenance plans to scheduled meeting needs to update things like that. And make sure that your server is solid to make sure you’ve got good backups. And we always make recommendations around making sure you’ve got backups off the server so that if that whole server is destroyed, you can get your backups and get back up and running. We’ll also look at how to help mitigate the risk if you’re hit with ransomware. To be able to make sure you’ve got backups off site somewhere that you can bring back, things like that. Doing all this it’s not just a one off thing. Usually it’s building a relationship so that we can be there down the road for you if you need help as well.

That’s just kind of the quick summary about a Database Health and Performance Assessment with Remediation Services.

Have a great day!

SQL Assessment Process Breakdown

Transcription of Video:

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