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…

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

February 25, 2019

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

February 18, 2019

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…

A Lot of Your SQL Servers Are Unsupported.

November 21, 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,…

How Much Memory is “Normal” for SQL Servers?

November 19, 2018

When I look at a SQL Server, one of the first things I check is, “How much memory does this thing have relative to the amount of data we’re hosting on here?” I’ve long used some seat-of-the-pants numbers, but armed with data from SQL ConstantCare® users who opted into public data sharing, let’s do a…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: You Should Probably Learn Power BI. I Did.

September 3, 2018

When I was prepping for the PASS Summit last year, I wanted to unveil something awesome and free that would help you analyze your SQL Server’s performance. I ended up building the Power BI Dashboard for DBAs, an easy way for you to visualize your server’s wait stats. When we started building SQL ConstantCare®, our…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: Updating ConstantCare.exe

August 27, 2018

When we started designing SQL ConstantCare® (back before we had a name for it), I listed out the main components at the beginning of the design doc: The beginning of a giant to-do list The collector (which later became ConstantCare.exe) was the only piece that would run client-side. I wanted to keep end user support…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: Now Free for Consulting Customers

August 20, 2018

We’re kinda like an emergency room for SQL Server: we specialize in a 3-day SQL Critical Care® where we work side by side with you, talking about your database pains, showing you the root cause, and then teaching you how to get permanent pain relief. That works really well, and we’ve kinda got it down…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: What Mentoring Is (and Isn’t)

July 23, 2018

When we built SQL ConstantCare® as a mentoring – not monitoring – product, I really meant the word mentoring. A lot of us are loners – the only SQL Server person in the office. Nobody really understands what we’re doing, and … we’re not even sure we understand, either. We were self-taught, and we didn’t…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: What Cloud Hosting Costs

July 16, 2018

Amazon Web Services (AWS), SQL ConstantCare

In our behind-the-scenes posts about building SQL ConstantCare®, I’ve written about how we picked serverless architecture for the application layer, and how picked AWS Aurora for the database layer. Hosting costs were a big driving factor in those decisions – so how has that worked out? Presented for your enjoyment, here are our total SQL…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: Analyzing Query Plans

July 9, 2018

Erik Darling

XML Delenda Est Last week, I talked about how we’re going to be collecting query plans from users who opt to have us do so (and only users who opt in! No surprises, here) by leveraging code we already have written in sp_BlitzCache, and how we’re going to do the XML analysis on our end using…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: Collecting Query Plans

July 2, 2018

Erik Darling

Coming Soon In an upcoming release, we’ll start collecting query plans from your servers. Since this may result in the transmission of PII, it will be opt-in only. We won’t be getting this by default, because we don’t want anyone to be uncomfortable with the level of data we’re collecting from their servers. This is…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: How We Use Feature Toggles

June 25, 2018

Development, SQL ConstantCare

In SQL ConstantCare®, you send in your SQL Server’s diagnostic data, our systems analyze it, and we email you a list of tasks you should perform to make your SQL Server faster and more reliable. Some recommendations are really straightforward: for example, hey, you should turn off Priority Boost. It’s really easy to determine if Priority…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: Why People Aren’t Using Query Store

June 11, 2018

Query Store (QDS), SQL ConstantCare

When Microsoft first talked about Query Store, I was wildly excited. It’s basically a black box flight data recorder for SQL Server, tracking which queries run over time, how much work they do, and how their execution plans change. And then it came out, and…hardly anybody used it. We thought it was a good idea,…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: Adding Daily Emails and Recognizing Your Work

May 21, 2018

When we first launched SQL ConstantCare®, the workflow was: You sent in data about your SQL Servers daily Our systems sent us (not you) recommendations on what to do Once a week, we reviewed those recommendations, made sure they made sense, adapted them when necessary, and then forwarded ’em on to you Over time, we became…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: I Love Unit Tests

May 14, 2018

Development, SQL ConstantCare

You know what my biggest regret is about sp_Blitz? No unit tests. Seriously. Back then, I wrote a bunch of T-SQL checks to see if a server had memory configuration errors, corruption, obscure trace flags, etc. Over time, sp_Blitz got bigger and bigger, and we started getting code contributions from strangers. Things got even more challenging…

Availability Groups Bug with Indexed Views

May 7, 2018

Breaking News, SQL ConstantCare

The short story: if you drop an index on an indexed view, queries on the Always On Availability Groups replicas that point to that indexed view will cause memory dumps. The long story: to reproduce – AND DO NOT DO THIS IN PRODUCTION – on the primary, create a couple of tables, an indexed view,…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: Refining Our Recommendations

April 30, 2018

One of the fun things about building SQL ConstantCare® as a cloud-based service is that we can iterate fast, making improvements based on the data we find. We can assess the population as a whole, figure out what people are doing well, and look more closely at the rules they’re struggling with. What checks are…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: Why We Avoided Graphs

April 23, 2018