- Host: Steve Stedman / Shannon Lindsay
- Recording Date: 1/8/2025
- Topic: New Year’s Resolutions
Stedman SQL Podcast Ep. 1 of Season 2
Steve Stedman and Shannon Lindsay discuss SQL Server New Year’s resolutions, emphasizing the importance of backup strategies, proactive monitoring, and staying updated with SQL Server versions. They highlight a January promotion offering 12 months of managed services for the price of 10, providing a 16% discount. Key resolutions include reviewing and testing backups, implementing proactive monitoring, ensuring systems are up-to-date, optimizing query performance, protecting against data corruption and ransomware, and planning for disaster recovery. They also stress the value of training and mentoring to improve SQL Server management. Resources like free white papers and a business continuity survey are available at Stedman Solutions.
Podcast Transcript
Steve Stedman 00:15 Hello and welcome to the Stedman SQL Podcast. This is Season Two. Episode One, I’m your host, Steve Stedman, and today I’m joined with my co host, Shannon Lindsay, hey, Shannon, welcome happy New Year. Going into season two, we started the podcast a few months ago, and I think we got 12 episodes in season one. And now, with the year rolling over, we’re rolling into season two. And then, speaking of New Year’s, the year rolling over, we have a January promotion at Stedman solutions. I wanted to talk about we have our managed services product where we take care of your SQL servers for a fixed monthly fee, and we have a promo going where you get 12 months for the price of 10 for the first year. Basically, that’s a 16% discount for year one, and it doesn’t change the service at all. It’s just a discount to save a little bit of money and to get people to take a look at our managed services product. We do quite a bit with managed services, and our managed service clients are very happy with the service we take care of on their servers.
So do you want to be a guest on our podcast? Do you want to bump me out or bump Shannon out and take one of our spots for another episode? You’re certainly welcome to if you have a SQL Server topic that you want to share with our listeners, just reach out to Shannon at Stedman solutions.com to schedule that she can help get it scheduled. Or you can go to Stedman solutions.com click on the podcast, click on the guest page, and there’s a link there to go to schedule a specific time that’s available for recording.
So welcome everyone to season two. This week’s topic is New Year’s resolutions, and applying those to SQL Server. We all, well, not everybody, but a lot of people, New Year’s rolls around and you come up with new resolutions. I know I could probably lose a couple of pounds or more this year and but today, we’re talking about SQL Server resolutions and things we can do with your SQL server to do better job. But also want to point out, before we jump into that, is we have new podcast branding that I came out with over the holidays. And if you go to stedman.us/podcast you can see it’s updated with the whole look and feel there. Check that out. Let me know what you think. So on to the resolutions.
Shannon Lindsay 02:43 All right. Resolution number one, reviewing and cleaning up your backups. Can you tell us why it might be a little bit important?
Steve Stedman 02:51 There’s an expression that we had. It’s like, well, you only had one job to do, and as a DBA, it’s like one of your absolute most important jobs you have to do is to have good backups and have them in a position where you can recover for them. Now, there’s a lot of reasons that you need backups, but gosh, and we work with clients all the time. I just worked with a client on a corruption repair. Where had we gosh, we’re probably close to 15 hours into it, and had they had good backups on the server that was in question, we probably could have got the whole corruption repair done in less than an hour, maybe two. So you can save a whole lot of time if you’ve got good backups. But more important than just thinking you have good backups is testing those backups to verify that they work and you can actually restore them correctly. I don’t know how many times I’ve worked with people where they say, I’ve got this problem and I need to restore for backup. Can you help me restore? And we go and look, and it turns out, well, gee, they don’t really have good backups. They’ve been overwritten or missing or something like that. And then you also want to make sure that we the backup frequency and the location is to match the business needs. Depends what you want to be able to recover from. For instance, being able to recover from some developer accidentally doing an update statement that deletes a column out of a table is a very different scenario than trying to recover from a ransomware attack. The ransomware attack you’re in a position where you’re getting hit with just a lot more like all your options that the ransomware can get to has been impacted before they encrypt your database. So a lot of the times, on site or on premises, backups are not good enough for that type of thing. So basically, figuring out what’s the best option to get you covered for all scenarios, and this is a big thing. I mean, I talked about our managed services promo this month, but we help our clients, whether you’re a managed service client or whether we do a performance or server health assessment, we help make sure that your backups are in good shape. Because the one thing I never want to ever have to tell a client is, I’m sorry we can’t restore your data because you. If you don’t have a good backup. So we have all kinds of things that we do with our reporting and database health monitor, our daily monitoring or event services, so that if something is happening you’re not getting regular backups, we have alerts that tell you about it, or if you’re running out of disc space, to tell you that too, so that you’re not in a position where you’re exposed because you don’t have good backups. So most important resolution of the year that I would say for SQL Server is to review your backup strategy and make sure that it covers your business needs.
Shannon Lindsay 05:31 And like you said, the one thing that we can do is just initialize that conversation of what are the important parts for that company, what alerts do they want? How often? And just having that plan in place, just starting that discussion.
Steve Stedman 05:49 And I think that if your backup strategy, in the event that you have to restore from backup involves going to Google and searching on, how do I restore a SQL Server Backup, you’re going to be in a very different position than if you have one of us helping out with it.
Shannon Lindsay 06:03 Resolution number two, implement proactive monitoring and alerts. Like I said, it comes down to when you want the alerts. How often and things like that. Can you give us some more details on what that kind of entails, too?
Steve Stedman 06:18 So whatever you’re using for alerts, whether it’s something in Database Health Monitor, whether it’s our daily monitoring, or whether it’s our managed services or some other product out there, or something homegrown that you’ve worked on, it’s all good as long as you have the ability to catch those key things that are going to impact your uptime and performance, things like running out of disk space. Don’t know how many times I’ve seen someone call up and say something happened with our backups. And we didn’t get transaction log backups for a couple days, and all of our transaction logs grew until our log drive was full, and SQL Server started crashing. Transactions started failing at that point. That’s one of those things I want to know about. A long time before we get to zero on the disk space, long time before we get to errors, so that we have time to correct it before anybody ever knows about it. I think another one that we see is long running queries, or things relating to long running queries, like blocking. And that’s one of those things that if somebody says something happened to the system yesterday, where it seemed it was bogged down around 2:30pm Yeah, we have all kinds of logging and stuff like that, database health monitor that we can go back and get a good idea of what was going on. What we also have is we have alerting so that we can alert you and send an email that says blocking is happening right now. We have queries that’s been running for 40 seconds and it’s blocking 25 other queries that it cannot run until it finishes. And that’s much more proactive than somebody saying, gee, the system seems slow. We’re able to, well, we or the client, are able to jump in and figure out, well, why is that blocking? And what can you declare that blocking and get things moving? Another important one is failed jobs, and whether it comes to be backups, like we talked about in the previous resolution or check DB or maintenance jobs. I mean, those are all important things to the overall health and performance your system, and you want to know if they’re working, if they’re working or not. I don’t know how many people have set up CheckDB to know if they don’t have database corruption, but it runs every night and they have no alerting so it fails, and they end up failing for like, two months on check dB, and then they get to a real serious position where something starts failing in the database, and it’s been failing for so long they don’t have any good backup from prior to when it occurred, so getting alerting when things fail, and part of this is using database health monitor, which is our product, can download database health.com and we have a lot of different checks and alerting for different things, like the blocking queries. You can install database health monitor, configure a job and get alerts when you have blocking queries in your system. So knowing about the issues is the key thing, and being able to react to them before they knock you out, rather than when it’s too late.
Shannon Lindsay 09:03 Yeah, and I know kind of tying us into our next resolution. I know a lot of the lot of the questions that come through is, I need help now, and one of the first questions we can ask is, are you up to date? Have you done the latest update? And, you know, just making sure that you’re on the latest update of your SQL version and to apply patches. So kind of from that starting point, what, where would you go from there?
Steve Stedman 09:34 Well, one of the things I like to look at, and that’s one of the things we work with all of our managed service customers this month, is to take a look at any servers that are more than four years old. So given we’re in 2025 right now, their SQL Server 2022 and anything older than that is now more than four years old. So it doesn’t mean if you’re running SQL Server 2019 that we have to be coming up with an update plan for today, but we. Just want to start talking about it. But if you’re still running 2008 2008 or 220 12, even 2014 is beyond end of life. At this point, we want to be looking at, how do we get you up updated to something that Microsoft still has security patches for? If you get a ransomware attack, and it’s because you’re running SQL server 2008 there’s been no security patches for it recently. Well, shame on you, because you should have moved up earlier and but a lot of people get stuck and they don’t know how to move up. So that’s where we can help. And we’ve got several clients who are working with an upgrade plan to get them off of an older version to a newer version of SQL Server right now. And that’s one of our core competencies that we do regularly so but also beyond security patching, when you go to those newer versions, you also get performance improvements and new features. So one of them, I mean, we’ve done a lot of upgrades over the years, but we’ve been in some scenarios where we’ve had real big limitations, like a lot of people are limited and say, Well, I can’t take eight hours of downtime in order to be able to upgrade my SQL Server. Well, we’ve gone where we’ve built out new SQL servers, and through effectively, a kind of a log shifting style method, we’ve been able to move terabytes of data from one server to another, get it all prepped and staged, get it caught up with transaction logs and move from one server to another with 10 to 20 hours of work to get there, but only 15 to 20 minutes or 10 minutes of downtime at the time we actually switch over, so we can really reduce downtime. There people are in a position where they say, I can’t upgrade because I don’t have time for that kind of a downtime where it’s too risky. And we help with the upgrades. We help with the patching. We track and let people know when there’s critical updates that they need to apply on their SQL Server. And we help with the patching when it’s necessary too. So it’s one of those things that check where you’re at and make sure that you’re up to date and know if the version of SQL Server you’re running is end of life or if Microsoft is still supporting it. So typically it’s about 10 years when they give up on supporting it.
Shannon Lindsay 12:10 Resolution number four common issues we’ve found is, you know, bad performance.
Steve Stedman 12:24. Things aren’t running how they should be. And main thing to kind of look at, too, is optimizing your query performance, and that’s something that we can help with quite a bit. We had Monday, the first Monday back to work after New Years, one of our managed service clients had an issue where they were having some performance problems. And we got together on a call, spent like 30 minutes with three of our team, and I think four or five of their team, and we found out what the issue was, came up with the solution and got it fixed and got it up and running, preventing that issue from happening again. We’ve been, I mean, that’s something that we do a lot of, but being able to know what those slow queries are, and figuring out when you’re having problems and what you can do to fix it, whether it’s indexes, whether it’s rewriting the queries, whether it’s outdated statistics, or whether it’s just a complete different data structure you might need. I mean, those are all things you need to be aware of. And there’s a lot of different ways to identify slow queries, but one of my favorites is the blocking Query Monitor and database self monitor. Because slow queries, yeah, they might be annoying, but when a query is slow and it’s blocking and preventing someone other query from even running, that’s where I start getting really concerned, because it’s not just being slow itself, but it’s impacting other queries or other people using the system. So we have our performance tuning class that can cover a lot of these different topics. Database health monitor is built all around. How do you track and catch those queries that need performance help, whether it’s weights blocking or other things, but make sure that you have a way to get a handle on your query performance. And if you need help, reach out to someone to help you with that.
Shannon Lindsay 13:55 All right, and let’s jump to number five, protect your data from corruption ransomware?
Steve Stedman 14:03 Yeah, that won’t happen to us. We’re not big enough. Someone else is going to get hit with that. Those are the kind of things that we hear from people who’ve been hit with ransomware. Anybody out there, whether you’re a multi billion dollar corporation or whether you’re a small mom and pop shop that’s just getting started, barely getting by. You can get hit with ransomware, and you can get hit to the point that it can put you out of business, or it can have significant impact on your system. Corruption is another one of those things, so we kind of lumped together corruption and ransomware here. So corruption, you want to monitor your database for that that’s one of those things that it’s usually related to IO or disk issues, but ransomware is one of those things you need to be ready. We have a free ransomware class that we give away at Stedman SQL school. The Price Is Right. It’s free. I recommend everyone watch that and learn just a little bit more, hopefully, about how to protect your SQL servers in the event that you’re hit with ransomware and the key. Key to protecting your data, whether it’s corruption or ransomware, is to be able to have good backups going back to resolution number one, but also have immutable backups, or off site backups, backups that can’t be changed, so when ransomware hits, they can’t go out and modify those backups if they’re off site or another location. So part of what we like to do is make sure everyone is positioned where they can recover. Well, if they are hit with ransomware, it’s not always about preventing ransomware, but it’s about being able to recover when you are hit with it, whether you hit ransom or die. We’ve seen people who have paid the ransom, and sometimes I mean what I read, the average ransom can be in a couple $100,000 range or more, depending on the size of your business. We’ve seen people who have paid it and still did not get their databases back because the ransomware software. They pay it, they get the key, and then the ransomware software isn’t tested well enough to work with really large files, like SQL Server database files, and even though they paid hundreds of 1000s of dollars. They don’t get their data back. We’ve also seen clients that have great backup strategy. They call me they were hit with ransomware. Their database was destroyed. We go grab their off Site Backups, bring it back into a restore. They’re up and running less than an hour. Ransomware is gone. Of course, they got to clean up their other servers, but the database is back to running that quick. So being able to be in a position where you can recover when you aren’t hit with ransomware, or if you do end up with database corruption, is really important.
Shannon Lindsay 16:28 And like you said, the client you’ve been working with, it could have been a couple hour procedure, but it the backups just weren’t there, and now it takes even longer just to try to get it back.
Steve Stedman 16:41 Absolutely. And that’s when we’re dealing with corruption. And the most expensive work that we do, or the most profits, profitable, might not be the right word, but the most costly work that we do for our clients is when somebody says we have a corrupt database and we have no backups, and it’s critical to our business, and there’s no option other than to try and repair what’s there and running there’s no backup we can recover from. So that can get really expensive. We can help with it, but I’d rather spend a couple hours helping someone then give up my whole weekend to try and repair a corrupt database that didn’t have any backups. Now, I’m happy to do it if we have to, but I’d rather not.
Shannon Lindsay 17:26 Yeah, and speaking of that, planning for it, planning for disaster recovery, backups and high availability groups.
Steve Stedman 17:37 So there’s a couple keys here. I mean disaster recovery and high availability overlaps quite a bit, but they can be two very different things, and disaster recovery is what happens if your primary data center, your whatever location you have, all your SQL servers, and gets knocked out. We worked with a client just last year, last year where we just got log shipping set up with them, going from one location to another city, a data center another city. And like the weekend after we got that configured, we were about ready to test it, and they lost their primary data center temporarily because of some ish local issue that took it out. So our what was going to be our test of switching over to their second data center with log shipping for disaster recovery ended up being a real situation. It took us about an hour to two to get that up and go into them at that second location, because it wasn’t fully scripted, but now we have it fully scripted, and if the same thing happened, we’re able to do it in about 15 minutes. So that is one of those things that what happens if your primary data center goes away? Are you okay losing all of your SQL servers for three or four days or a week? Well, some local disaster, whether it’s something to do with the local data center or weather or, who knows, what takes out your system, most people are not okay with that. Coming up with good plan now, high availability and disaster recovery can play hand in hand, and things like setting up SQL Server availability groups and setting up redundancies, we help with that all the time, where you can set up multiple servers and an availability group so that one goes down, the other one immediately takes over, I think, working on a combination of those, but figuring out how you’re going to be in a better position than you are today, and at least understanding what your position is today so you can figure out how to be better. Doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be better than how you are now. And because we’re just talking about New Year’s resolutions here, how do we make it a little bit better?
Shannon Lindsay 19:38 So one thing that you know all of this kind of has in common is you can invest in it to start with. And, yeah, there might be an initial startup cost of the planning process, and, you know, getting all the backups in place, having everything where it needs to be. But do you want. Want to invest in that? Or do you want to have to pay the cost of everything failing? And one of that is the investing in the training and the mentoring.
Steve Stedman 20:10 There’s several areas there. And I think one of the earlier at Stedman Siegel school, we’ve got about 10 classes there now, but one of the earlier classes I built was our backup and recovery class, and the key is, so many people focus on backups, that class really focuses on making sure, making sure you’re in a position to do the recovery when something happens. And that, I think people ask me, Well, what can I do to get a little bit stronger in my skills? Well, I think the number one thing you can do is learn how to do good backups, and that class can help you with that, both with on premise, off premise, cloud based backups, all those kind of things. Now some people need a little bit more help, and that’s where we offer mentoring hours. And that’s one of those things that if you need help to learn and you don’t know how to do it yourself, you can book us where you buy a four hour block. And then we can use 15 minutes here, 20 minutes there, until you use it up. That’s going to just help you with whatever it is you might be working on it. If you’ve got some reporting services, thing you’re trying to do, we could do that if you’re trying to figure out how to get your backups. And are your backups in good position? Well, we can help you with our mentoring hours. And then for those who are in our managed services, keep in mind that that also includes mentoring hours and free online courses for everyone in your team. So if you have one SQL Server under Managed Services on a monthly basis, everyone on your team has access to all of our classes as well as mentoring hours, certain number of mentoring hours based on the number of servers. So doing what you can invest in your team, invest in yourself to become stronger in what you do through training different mentoring options. Yeah. So this is where I’d say, Welcome to 2025 get ready for whatever might happen. And I think that going through the summary here and making sure you’ve got good backups and you know how to deal with them, monitoring alerts, updates and patches, query performance, protect your data. Disaster Recovery and high availability and training and mentoring are all what I would recommend as New Year’s resolutions. And at Stedman solutions, we can help with the we can help quite a bit with these, but you don’t have to use us for that. I mean, as long as you’re doing something to improve all of these every single day or every single week as a resolution, you’re going to be in better shape. We can help with the class. We can help with mentoring. We can help with server assessment, or we can help with full managed services agreement, where we take over the management local server so you don’t have to worry about it at all. So it’s all good stuff. So Shannon, which one do you want to go learn more about?
Shannon Lindsay 22:51 I mean, for me, honestly, the biggest thing is just having I think people have backups in place, but I think the testing of the backups is huge, because you can think you have a plan, but unless you’re constantly testing them, that you’re going to end up in a situation that even though it’s planned for it still has to be made sure that it works.
Steve Stedman 23:15 And the difference between someone saying, Yes, we absolutely have backups we can use versus, Oh, I thought we had backups can be a very different or life changing experience. For some people, there’s a term we like to use sometimes in DBA world, a resume generating event, meaning, if, if you didn’t have good backup, well, yeah, if you didn’t have good backups, maybe you just need a good resume to go get that job. It happened too many times, so absolutely, and we’ll help you so you don’t have to go get that next new job if you need that help.
So call to action. There’s a few things here that I want to recommend, but we’ve got our business continuity survey. It’s a free thing. You can go through and answer a bunch of questions. At the end of it, you’ll get a report that tells how well you’re doing on business continuity, relating to disaster recovery and things like that. It’s free. There’s no commitment. Take a look at it. Check it out at stedman.us/continuity, and best case, you learn that there’s some hole there that you need to deal with, and you take care of it few minutes to fill it done. We also have a maintaining SQL Server white paper available at Stedman solutions.com/maintaining-sql, server, dash white paper. And we have four or five other white papers there as well that are free downloads that can help you learn more about how to do some of these things we need to take care of. If you’re interested in finding out more about how we can help with managed services, Stedman solutions.com/manage-services or if you want to check out database health monitor as a monitoring and tool for taking care of your SQL Server, there’s a free download at database health.com so that’s our call to action. If you want to. To improve. If you don’t want to improve, you don’t have to do any of these, but if you want to improve and be in a better place with your SQL server over the next year, hopefully this is a bunch of ideas that will help put you in a better position. So I guess at this point, everyone, thanks for watching Shannon. Thanks for hosting with me today, of course. And happy new year and hopefully 2025 brings great opportunities for everyone.
Shannon Lindsay 25:25 Happy New Year, everybody.
Steve Stedman 25:40 Thanks for watching our video. I’m Steve, and I hope you’ve enjoyed this. Please click the thumbs up if you liked it. And if you want more information, more videos like this, click the subscribe button and hit the bell icon so that you can get notified of future videos that we create.
For further information check out how we can help with a consultation today.