SQL ConstantCare

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…

Things to Consider When SQL Server Asks for an Index

March 10, 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

March 3, 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?

January 13, 2020

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

December 9, 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

December 2, 2019

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…

New Multi-Server Emails for SQL ConstantCare®

November 25, 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® Now Gives Index Advice, Too.

November 14, 2019

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

May 16, 2019

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 we 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…

Building SQL ConstantCare®: Analyzing Query Plans

July 9, 2018

Erik Darling