Maybe I’ve forgotten the name and the address of every patient I’ve helped throughout my years in EMS back when I was still involved, but there’s one thing I know: quite a few would say hindsight is 20/20.
The older I get, the more I see how often this pattern repeats. Whether it was the countless patients who could have avoided the emergency room if they’d followed advice years ago—or the SQL Server environments we’ve rescued at Straight Path— regret is a harsh reality.
When we do health checks or get pulled into SQL Server emergencies, we consistently see the same patterns repeat. After helping hundreds of environments recover from SQL Server emergencies over the past two decades, I can assure you these regrets are avoidable.
A Series of SQL Server Lessons From Consulting
This is the first post in a series I’ll be sharing over the next several weeks. You can call them a loosely connected set of lessons I’ve learned in my own DBA career or helped clients learn – things that I’d like to donate our collective hindsight to you about. I’ll share the posts below, and as they go live, I’ll update this post with a link.
Pull up the posts, review them, have a conversation with your team, and wake up to these points each day you read a post; that would be a start:
- Blue Monday:— Mondays can be a real bad day for a SQL Server. What do you need to do ahead of time? What do you need to watch?
- Bizarre Love Triangle – AV tools, DBAs, Sysadmins. We’ve made a lot of money from bad deploys of Sentinel One and other AV tools. Let’s pull those lessons apart.
- Confusion – Cloud backups, VM backups, Snapshots. Are you really okay? How do you know? Find out for SURE with confidence before you need the restore.
- Temptation – Some see the cloud as heaven, a gateway, a hope… It can be, sure… But when folks think you can just guess at the IaaS sizing or blindly push into PaaS – the bolts from above hurt the people down below in the office.
- Isolation—Team dynamics. Blurred lines. Poor Communication. This causes downtime and raises consulting time.
- Transmission – Documentation matters. It matters every day. But it matters in crisis.
- Disorder – Troubleshooting skills matter. Injecting calm and leadership into a bad situation makes all the difference.
- True Faith – Security matters. It’s time to get true faith in the security of your SQL Servers. Think about the worst cases, save your runbooks, and do the best you can at the SQL server side.
- Everything’s Gone Green – At Straight Path in our Managed SQL Server DBA as a Service offering – we tell clients, “We sell green checkmarks.” Following the tips in the eight preceding blog posts, you’ll start with more green checkmarks on your proactive and daily health checks.
Check out these posts as they come out. I might add more if Spotify makes me think of a few more topics. Take the lessons. Use the tools mentioned in the relevant posts to improve your SQL Server environment.
With your SQL Server Estate, you have two choices:
- You can wake up every day and start – You can find the issues, fix them, and not have to complain later about your wounded environment.
- Or you can wait until tomorrow – but that’s exactly what many teams say just before things fall apart.
We’re here to help you on this journey. You can buy a bucket of 20 hours to run a health check and find and fix your SQL Server Issues with you. You can buy 4 hours of emergency triage and mentoring time. You can engage with us with DBA as a Service. Send me an e-mail, or we can have a conversation on the telephone – 1.888.SQL.DATA.
