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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…