Wanna know where you fit in relation to someone else? Get the answers to these questions.
1. How many SQL Server instances do you have? The pro folks use the word “instances” rather than servers because clusters may have multiple SQL Server instances per node.
2. How many DBAs work with you? One person managing 300 instances is very different than a team of 5 people managing those same servers.
3. What’s the total data size? You don’t have to get fancy and calculate space used – just add up all the files in Windows Explorer. If you want to collect this on a regular basis, use the backup sizes from the msdb tables.
4. How busy is your busiest server? Check the Perfmon counter SQL Server: SQL Statistics – Batch Requests per Second during your peak load times.
Have these answers ready off the top of your head, and you’ll get much better advice from other admins. The answers for a 100GB server doing 100 batch requests per second are very different than the ones for 10TB doing 100,000 batch requests per second.
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Isn’t the answer always “buy bigger hardware”?!? 🙂
My clients are sometimes lucky if they know whether or not they are even USING SQL Server! Just had a potential client tell me (in the first 3 minutes of the call – yes, I always verify) that yes they were using SQL Server for their data storage. After dealing with NDA, contract, SOW, etc., it turns out they are using MySQL and the LAMP stack. Sigh…
Would be interesting to actually collect responses from the readers and tally em up to get a rough idea of what the ‘other side’ is dealing with and where you fit in (albeit on a tentative sample size)
1 – 125 (prod)
2 – 3
3- 3TB
4 – 5-6k
Am I going to be the one to have to do it? Alright.
But he said that size *didn’t* matter!?
1. 700
2. 3,5
3. 50TB
1. 70
2. 3
3. 2.8TB
4. 700/Sec
1. = One
2. = One – Me. 🙂
3. = 37.5 GB
1. 1150
2. 1 in dk, 2 in sweden, ? in india
3. 275+ TB
1. 80
2. 2+1
3. 12TB
4. ~4000
OK, I’ll play
1. 121 (54 I have access to, plus 67 I don’t yet)
2. me and me alone. I am the first DBA my employer has ever had in 40 years, SQL instances are a mess!
3. 8 TB (of those I have access to )
4. ~1200