At Koderly, we offer businesses a database health check, which is a comprehensive review of your SQL Server environment. It’s a popular service amongst those customers who recognise the benefits that this database health check can bring, such as improving critical application performance and ensuring the security and availability of their data.
Here are five reasons why you should consider a database health check for your environment.
5 Reasons to Consider a Database Health Check
1. Query Tuning
Hardware is expensive, especially in the cloud, and at Koderly we strongly believe in tuning the workload (i.e. the queries), before spending money on the latest hardware. SQL Server performance tuning should always start with the queries themselves as you need to get the most out of your not-inconsiderable investment in SQL Server.
Our database health check will take a deep-dive into your environment’s most expensive queries. It will identify the queries that are using the most server resources and suggest changes that will both speed up those queries and reduce the overall workload. We’ll empower you with information to take back to your application vendor which if acted on, could further improve application performance.
2. Optimal Configuration
When your business-critical application was first installed, did anyone take the time to tune your SQL Server instance so it was optimised for your workload? At Koderly, we’ve spent a lot of time tuning SQL Server instances over the years, and 95% of the time that answer is a firm “No”.
SQL Server has an array of configuration options which, when set correctly, can deliver a significant performance improvement, both for individual queries and the entire workload.
It’s very rare that SQL Server’s ‘out of the box’ default settings are appropriate for your environment. Probably the most common setting we see is “Cost Threshold for Parallelism” being set to the default of 5. You may not realise, but this value came from a server in a Microsoft lab from the 1990’s. It makes no sense for modern and is likely hurting the overall throughput on your server.
3. Data Security
We all know data security is important. A lack of it can destroy a business. Our database health check will report on how secure your SQL Server environment is and make recommendations for improvements.
We’ll consider both access to the server (at the network level) and the security of the data itself. We’ll report on what additional security options are available to you to further improve the security of your data (I’ve previously blogged about a few of them here).
4. Capacity Planning
You’re part of a successful business, and your data is growing. So are your users and customers. Those users are doing more and more, running intense processes, and executing complex reports against your databases that are hammering your SQL Server. Your applications are slowing down as a result.
Capacity planning is concerned with how well your SQL Server environment will cope with these changes in the future. Our database health check will seek to understand your workload and tell you how hard your database server is working today, so you can be pro-active, not re-active, and take action now before it causes problems for your users and applications.
5. Disaster Recovery (DR)
If your SQL Server suffered a serious failure, how much data would you lose? How long would it take you to recover? A key reason to have a database health check is to answer these two critical questions.
DR isn’t just about having backups, it’s about being ready to implement a backup and recovery strategy that works for your business. We will review your current DR strategy, establish your current Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO), and then show you how to get to your desired RPO and RTO.
I hope you found this information useful. If you’re interested in learning more about Koderly’s SQL Server Health Check, or our other database services, then please contact us!
Thanks for reading!
