Software vendors have a wide variety of clients: Some clients don't have any IT staff at all, and just outsource everything. The client wants to hand an installation manual to their contractor and say, "Build whatever the software vendor wants." Some clients have a full time sysadmin or two, and those sysadmins don't really know…
Carry on
It turns out that the only thing harder than checking for new databases restored to a SQL Server, is checking a folder for a backup of a database that doesn't exist on another SQL Server.
Building stuff
I sometimes really hate coming up with ideas, and much prefer someone to just say "I want this" so I can go out into the world and figure out how to do that. Occasionally though, I realize that I'm not going to get all that much direction. That's what happened with sp_BlitzQueryStore.
As I picked up a nutritious breakfast from my favorite bakery (love ya, Magnolia), I noticed a sign in the window saying they were certified Kosher. As I usually do, I thought about how that kind of thing applied to databases. The Star-K symbol on food products or restaurants means that the ingredients and processes have been…
I've seen servers with thousands of databases on a single SQL Server, and it works. Sure, opening the databases list in SQL Server Management Studio is painful, and a lot of third party monitoring tools fall over, but it's not so bad once you know how to work around these issues.
But there's two issues you can't work around: our old archenemies, RPO and RTO. A quick reminder:
Performance tuning of independent software vendor (ISV) databases is a little tricky.
To understand who does what, let's think through all of the work required with building and hosting a database application:
When you're the database administrator working with a software product that stores every client's data in a different database, the sheer number of databases can be intimidating. As you grow from dozens to hundreds to thousands of databases, you can't treat all of them equally.
Start by making a graph of the database sizes - here's an example from one of my clients with 58 databases on a server (certainly not a big number, but just easy to digest in a blog post):
When you're building an application for lots of clients, there are two common ways to design the database(s):
Option A: Put all clients in the same database
Option 2: Build one database per client
