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 of SQL Server is still 2016:
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 LOW! DISK QUEUE LENGTH IS HIGH! It all just turns into noise.
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 of SQL Server is still 2016. The combination of 2014, 2016, and 2017 make up 74% of market share right now:
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.
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:
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, 2016, and 2017 make up 75% of market share right now:
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
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 share their anonymized data to get better recommendations overall.
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.
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 even bad suggestions can be useful if you examine 'em more closely.
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.
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:
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 what they should do next.
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…
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…
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 day - and are users really going to notice if, say, I turn Lock Pages in Memory on? Especially when I'm not having any memory pressure to begin with?
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…
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 and more reliable.
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,…
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 little deeper analysis.
