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SQL ConstantCare

SQL ConstantCare® Population Report: Summer 2021

Last Updated July 12, 2021

SQL Server Population Report

Ever wonder how fast people are adopting new versions of SQL Server, or what’s “normal” out there for SQL Server adoption rates, hardware sizes, or numbers of databases? Let’s find out in the summer 2021 version of our SQL ConstantCare® population report. Out of the 3,808 servers sending in data recently, the most popular version…

SQL ConstantCare

New SQL ConstantCare® Feature: One Serious Query to Tune

Last Updated February 20, 2021

SQL ConstantCare

Our monitoring tool, SQL ConstantCare®, is different. Some monitoring tools send you a whole bunch of emails for every little thing that’s happening on every one of your server – and having you end up just creating an Outlook rule to dump them all into a folder that you never read. PAGE LIFE EXPECTANCY IS…

SQL ConstantCare® Population Report: Fall 2020

Last Updated December 7, 2020

SQL Server Population Report

Ever wonder how fast people are adopting new versions of SQL Server, or what’s “normal” out there for SQL Server adoption rates, hardware sizes, or numbers of databases? Let’s find out in the summer 2020 version of our SQL ConstantCare® population report. Out of the 3,650 servers sending in data recently, the most popular version…

SQL ConstantCare

Building SQL ConstantCare®: What Database Growths Do You Care About?

Last Updated October 15, 2020

SQL ConstantCare

SQL ConstantCare® alerts you when your databases have unusual growths. No, not like that one on your neck. And you should really get that checked out. No, I’m talking about a database that suddenly jumps in size, making you suspicious about whether somebody created a backup table or built a set of ridiculously large indexes.…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: Warning You About New Large Tables & Indexes

Last Updated September 24, 2020

SQL ConstantCare

When I’m doing a SQL Server health check, one of the things I like showing clients is a list of their top tables by size. Inevitably, there are a bunch of tables that: Tables whose names start with “temp” or “backup” or “just_in_case” Tables with no clustered index that were clearly created with a select-into,…

SQL Server Version Adoption Rate

SQL ConstantCare® Population Report: Summer 2020

Last Updated August 31, 2020

SQL Server Population Report

Ever wonder how fast people are adopting new versions of SQL Server, or what’s “normal” out there for SQL Server adoption rates, hardware sizes, or numbers of databases? Let’s find out in the summer 2020 version of our SQL ConstantCare® population report. The most popular version of SQL Server is 2016. The combination of 2014,…

SQL ConstantCare

What SQL ConstantCare® Has Been Finding In Your Servers Lately

Last Updated July 28, 2020

SQL ConstantCare

SQL ConstantCare® analyzed over 3,000 of your SQL Servers this month. Here are the things we check for and the number of servers where we found this problem this month: Backup Back Up Your TDE Certificate – 137 servers affected Take a Full Backup – 370 servers affected Take a Log Backup – 353 servers affected…

SQL ConstantCare

SQL ConstantCare® Population Report: Spring 2020

Last Updated June 1, 2020

SQL Server Population Report, Videos

Ever wonder what’s “normal” out there for SQL Server adoption rates, hardware sizes, or numbers of databases? Let’s find out in the spring 2020 version of our population report. Our SQL ConstantCare® service lets users send data in about their SQL Servers and get health & performance advice via email. Users can opt in to…

SQL ConstantCare

SQL ConstantCare® Now Tells You Which Indexes to Drop.

Last Updated May 25, 2020

Indexing, SQL ConstantCare

Indexes slow down data changes. SQL Server doesn’t have the concept of asynchronous indexes – copies of the data that it could update later when it’s bored. It has to keep every nonclustered index up to date, every single time you change data, like a delete/update/insert. Mo’ indexes, mo’ problems. That’s why in my Mastering…

SQL ConstantCare

Things to Consider When SQL Server Asks for an Index

Last Updated March 1, 2020

Indexing, SQL ConstantCare

One of the things I love about SQL Server is that during query plan compilation, it takes a moment to consider whether an index would help the query you’re running. Regular blog readers will know that I make a lot of jokes about the quality of these recommendations – they’re often incredibly bad – but…

SQL ConstantCare® Population Report: Winter 2020

Last Updated May 30, 2020

SQL Server Population Report

Ever wonder what’s “normal” out there for SQL Server adoption rates, hardware sizes, or numbers of databases? Let’s find out. Our SQL ConstantCare® service lets users send data in about their SQL Servers and get health & performance advice via email. Users can opt in to share their anonymized data to get better recommendations overall.…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: Which Recommendations Do People Mute?

Last Updated January 9, 2020

SQL ConstantCare

Our SQL ConstantCare® service sends you daily recommendations for specific tasks that will improve your SQL Server’s health and performance. Next to each recommendation, there’s a Mute link that you can click on to either mute the recommendation entirely, or mute it for specific databases, indexes, or queries: When we brought out that feature last…

Upsizing the SQL ConstantCare® Database Servers

Last Updated December 7, 2019

Amazon Web Services (AWS), SQL ConstantCare

If you’re looking for SQL Server news, just skip this post. I’m going to talk about general business & capacity planning type stuff here today. Our SQL ConstantCare® customers install an app that polls diagnostic data from their SQL Servers and Azure SQL Databases, upload it to us daily, and then automatically get advice on…

SQL ConstantCare® Population Report: Fall 2019

Last Updated May 7, 2020

SQL Server Population Report

Our SQL ConstantCare® service lets users send data in about their SQL Servers and get health & performance advice via email. Users can opt in to share their anonymized data to get better recommendations overall. With 3,568 database servers sharing data as of November 28, there’s a lot of useful information in here for the…

SQL ConstantCare

New Multi-Server Emails for SQL ConstantCare®

Last Updated November 23, 2019

Company News, SQL ConstantCare

With our SQL ConstantCare® service, you install a service that polls your SQL Servers once a day, and then we send you a daily email telling you the most important tasks to perform on that server to make it faster and more reliable. We’re all about minimizing the amount of emails you get from us…

SQL ConstantCare

SQL ConstantCare® Now Gives Index Advice, Too.

Last Updated November 13, 2019

SQL ConstantCare

When I was a DBA, I got so sick and tired of monitoring tools and scripts yelling at me to make a million different changes – most of which didn’t really have any measurable impact on performance or reliability. Sure, I want things to go fast, but I only have so many hours in the…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: Letting You Mute Recommendations

Last Updated May 16, 2019

SQL ConstantCare

When we first launched SQL ConstantCare®, I saw it as a mentoring service, not a monitoring service. I wanted to give you advice that I’d learned the hard way across managing lots of systems. With that in mind, I told users as they came onboard, “If there are any recommendations that you want me to…

Brent Ozar at the Porsche Museum

Building SQL ConstantCare®: Europeans, what do you want to see in a cloud-based monitoring product?

Last Updated February 19, 2019

SQL ConstantCare

About a year ago, with GDPR enforcement looming, we decided to hit the brakes on EU sales because we weren’t confident enough in the third party app ecosystem’s compliance capabilities, or the EU’s ability to police the regulation effectively. In the time since, it’s been interesting to see that: Few folks requested their data or…

Building SQL ConstantCare® Version 2: Easy-to-Afford Monitoring

Last Updated February 17, 2019

SQL ConstantCare

tl;dr – SQL ConstantCare® is now just $59 per month, or $495 per year. As we were building SQL ConstantCare®, I wanted it to be mentoring, not monitoring. I wanted to take daily data samples, trend them over time, and give you big-picture advice on what tasks you should focus on to make your SQL Servers faster…

Brent Ozar reading

A Lot of Your SQL Servers Are Unsupported.

Last Updated November 19, 2018

Production Database Administration, SQL ConstantCare

I’m almost afraid to look into the SQL ConstantCare® client base to see the answer to this, but let’s put on a pair of rubber gloves and go find out. SQL Server 2016: <1% out of support. I LOVE YOU PEOPLE. However, you’ve had the luxury of time here: SP1 came out in November 2016,…

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