Our Services

BestSQLDBA offers a comprehensive set of SQL DBA services to our clients. It is our aim to provide our clients with most of the same resources that they would be able to get from hiring a database professional to come work in their office directly. Your SQL Server(s) will be managed and maintained according to the same high quality standards set out as best practices by Microsoft that are used in large corporate enterprise SQL Server deployments in order to safeguard a company’s critical data.

Monthly Subscription Plans:

Each of our subscription plans offer our clients comprehensive coverage in each of the following areas:

Installation and configuration of SQL Server (if necessary):

We will conduct a thorough review of your business needs and devise the best configuration plan for your business. An action plan will be developed and scheduled for implementation at a time that is most convenient for your business. Our goal here will be to find the best SQL Server set up that will compliment the way that your business works, and to then implement it while causing the least amount of interruption to the daily workings of your office.

Security Patch Management:

We will continually monitor for new security patches from Microsoft and evaluate the need to apply them to your environment. If and when security patches are required for your server(s) we will then schedule off hours deployment of the new patches so as to cause the least amount of disturbance.

Custom built backup and recovery plans:

Comprehensive backup and recovery plans will be designed and implemented to keep your crucial data safe. Built specifically to suit your server(s), our backup and recovery procedures are designed to make certain that in the event of a catastrophic failure all of your crucial SQL Server data is always recoverable in a timely fashion.

Custom built maintenance procedures:

Daily, weekly, and monthly maintenance processes will be tailored for your server(s) to keep them operating at peak efficiency. Not every server is the same, this is particularly true when talking about SQL Server. Our database administrator will conduct a thorough analysis of how your server is used by your organization and what particular loads it is responsible for handling. The essential preventative maintenance that SQL Server requires will then be custom coded and scheduled in a manner that best compliments the workload that your SQL Server(s) need to accomplish.

Daily health checks (Both automated and Live):

The status of your server(s) will be monitored by our database administrator on an ongoing daily basis. Custom reports detailing the health of your server(s) will be designed and distributed through email to both yourself and our SQL DBA. Additionally automated e-mail alerts will be set up to alert both yourself and our SQL DBA to emergency conditions as they are developing, so that fast action may be taken in order to avoid getting into a situation where the server stops responding.

Subject area expertise:

Our SQL DBA is an available resource that you can call upon when faced with having to evaluate SQL Server related products or projects for your business. You can draw upon this expert level resource to help you make the best SQL Server related decisions for your business.

Reduced SQL project rate:

As one of our monthly customers you will receive a greatly reduced hourly rate of $25.00 per hour for individual projects. This is a savings of $125.00 per hour off of the normal hourly rate for individual projects.

Individual SQL Projects:

In addition to our monthly maintenance plans, we also offer SQL consultant services for ad-hoc projects that will be billed on an hourly basis. Subject areas that we cover are as follows:

• Installation and configuration of SQL Server (2000, 2005, and 2008 editions)
• Backups and maintenance set up
• Performance Monitoring and Tuning
• SQL Server High Availability set up (Clusters, Database Mirroring, Log Shipping)
• SQL Server Edition Upgrades
• Database Replication
• SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) Development
• SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) Development
• Stored Procedure Development (Transact SQL)
• General SQL Server Troubleshooting

This list is a general listing of areas where we can provide assistance, but it is not comprehensive. Please contact us today for a free consultation. We are flexible and always strive to meet our customer’s SQL Server needs in all areas.

I got an e-mail today from an old co-worker of mine that I hadn’t spoken with in some time. He reminded me of a situation that we had at a company that we both started at around the same time. They will remain nameless for obvious reasons, but I can tell you that they are a fairly large financial firm. When we started the job we were told that there had been a DBA working there prior to us being hired and that said DBA had taken care of the firm’s database servers for a number of years. We expected to find all the usual bits and bobs in place and we would just begin building a system of standards and roll it out to the servers we were responsible for. What we found what something quite different.

All of the firm’s primary production SQL Servers were being “backed up” by copying the .mdf, and .ldf files onto a file server nightly. When the IT Director told us about this system you can image the looks of shock painted on both of our faces. We both stammered trying to explain to him why this wouldn’t work. These servers were responsible for processing and recording financial transactions with amounts in excess of 100 million dollars.

So the thing my old co-worker wanted to e-mail me about was a new job that he just started where he has now run into the exact same situation.

I wish that I could say that that one time long ago was the only time I had ever encountered this problem myself, but sadly it wasn’t.

Look, I understand that backing up the databases properly and making certain that they are recoverable maybe isn’t the most interesting part of the job, but it is arguably your primary responsibility as a DBA. Before you get yourself involved in any other projects you should be designing a backup system that assures recoverability of the databases under any and all circumstances.