Mike Walsh

Mike loves mentoring clients on the right Systems or High Availability architectures because he enjoys those lightbulb moments and loves watching the right design and setup come together for a client. He loves the architecture talks about the cloud - and he's enjoying building a Managed SQL Server DBA practice that is growing while maintaining values and culture. He started Straight Path in 2010 when he decided that after over a decade working with SQL Server in various roles, it was time to try and take his experience, passion, and knowledge to help clients of all shapes and sizes. Mike is a husband, and father to four great children and lives in the middle of nowhere NH.

SQL Server Corruption – Read Before it Happens

February 7, 2020January 24, 2017 by Mike Walsh

SQL Server Corruption is a rather complex topic. As a consultant, I’ve been called in many times to help a client suffering from SQL Server corruption in some form or another. As a forum post answerer I’ve helped some pretty sad situations and tried to help. There have been times when I’ve reached out to … Read more

DBA Questions To Ask Software Vendors

March 6, 2021January 17, 2017 by Mike Walsh

Questions for a DBA To Ask a Software Vendor

Do you buy software from independent software vendors? Does it run on SQL Server? Are you responsible for supporting that software? Here are some questions that you can ask a software vendor about the way they use SQL Server. It’s best to ask these questions before you are a customer, too; you’ll have a bit … Read more

SQL Server Version Numbers – Do they matter?

March 5, 2022January 17, 2017 by Mike Walsh

It’s a trick question, yes. Your SQL Server version matters! In this post I’ll tell you how to check your version, talk about what makes up the version number and talk about why it matters so much and why you should get a plan in place to regularly upgrade or update SQL Server. This post is part of … Read more

Introducing Straight Up SQL Server Tips

February 7, 2020January 16, 2017 by Mike Walsh

An Introduction and a Why. . . I’ve been blogging about SQL Server since 2009. Over the years I’ve blogged about many topics and levels. For some reason, I’ve most loved writing the posts to beginner and intermediate levels though. Things that trip folks up day to day, etc. While I’ve been an independent consultant … Read more

Are Power Saving Settings Killing Your SQL Server Performance? [Quick Tip]

June 22, 2022December 28, 2016 by Mike Walsh

At Straight Path Solutions, we love performing SQL Server Health Assessments. These are our exams that dig quickly into the root of your SQL Server instance and find problems that you are currently suffering from. Then we give you an action plan to stop suffering from them today. Rather than just performing the checks and finding the … Read more

Check SQL Server Configuration – Free Script

March 10, 2022November 25, 2016 by Mike Walsh

I do a lot of SQL Server Health Assessments on SQL Server environments. I’m always checking sys.configurations to look for problematic instance level configuration settings. I almost always find configurations worth changing. But the approach I’ve always used is a bit manual and I wanted to fix it. So I finally wrote a script to … Read more

Remote DBA Benefits – After Hours Support

February 7, 2020November 23, 2016 by Mike Walsh

2016 has proven to be a busy year for Straight Path! We launched our DBA On Demand Service. This is a Senior level Remote DBA offering – the basic premise being “what if you had access to world class Senior level talent, and paid for only what you needed from them?”. We’ve on boarded several … Read more