- Listen on Spotify!
- Host: Steve Stedman
- Topic: What Every One-Server Shop Needs to Know About SQL Server
- Recording Date: June 10, 2025
Stedman SQL Podcast Season 2 Episode 19 One Server Shop
Steve Stedman discusses managing SQL Server in a one-server shop without a full-time DBA. He highlights the challenges of inadequate database management, including performance slowdowns, data corruption, and security vulnerabilities. Stedman Solutions offers Database Health Monitor version 3 coming soon, and managed services with experienced DBAs. He emphasizes the importance of regular backups, proactive monitoring, and disaster recovery. A real-world example shows how they improved a client’s sales report performance. Stedman also addresses the high cost of hiring full-time DBAs and the benefits of managed services, including peace of mind and cost-effectiveness.
Podcast Transcript
Steve Stedman 00:15
Hey everyone, and welcome to this week’s episode of The Stedman SQL Server Podcast. This week, we’re going to talk about the one server shop, how to do SQL server right without a full time DBA. And with that, we’re going to touch a little bit on how we can help and other resources that are available there. So first off, I’m your host, Steve Stedman. I’m founder of Stedman Solutions. I’ve got just over 30 years of SQL Server experience, and I’ve started Stedman Solutions 10 years ago, and we’ve been doing nothing but SQL Server consulting. A little bit of news coming soon, Database Health Monitor, version three, scheduled to come out this summer. We’re working on kind of the fine tune and staging that, just trying to get the release scheduled around vacations and whatnot, to make sure that we’ve got the right coverage when we get that done. Just a little bit of background on the podcast. This is season two, Episode 19, and our mission with the podcast is to deliver practical SQL Server advice for DBAs developers and IT managers.
So really, the thing is, how do you do SQL Server, right? How do you take care of your SQL Server appropriately when you only have one SQL Server? And the easy answer is, well, you just hire a DBA. But typically, when you just have one SQL Server, it’s not a big enough environment to keep a single DBA busy full time, and I think that a lot of the time, people end up with SQL servers, where maybe they didn’t even intend to have a SQL Server to begin with, and some part of the business purchased some software application that required SQL Server, or some legacy part of the system, or who knows what, but you ended up with a SQL Server in your environment. It might not be your core business, but you’ve got one, and you’ve got to take care of it.
So the challenges in doing this is that DBA skills with SQL Server are a very specialty item, where it’s different than taking care of a file server or a mail server or other Active Directory type stuff, things like that. I’m not going to pretend that I know anything about active taking care of Active Directory, so, but I do know SQL Server, so I know they’re quite different. Now, oftentimes the person who may be sitting closest to the SQL Server, or maybe the person who once used SQL Server, ends up being assigned the responsibility for taking care of SQL Server, and that might be okay on a day to day basis, but when something goes wrong, or there’s something you really need help with, sometimes you’re in a position where you’re going to need someone with more experience than just that person who was sitting closest to the SQL Server. I guess it really depends on how mission critical the application is, or the applications that are using your SQL Server, and I like to look at it.
And some advice from a friend a long time ago was look at what’s the worst thing that could go wrong, and how would you deal with it. And the worst thing that could go wrong is typically that your SQL server could crash, it could go down, and you could lose everything. Now, if it’s some, I don’t know, maybe a ticket system, that’s not real important, yeah, maybe you get away with rebuilding it from scratch. But if it’s something like your accounting system, or your HR or something that you’re being audited on, yeah, you’re not in a position where you can lose that data. And I think if you look at, well, the worst case scenario is you could lose the whole SQL Server. If you’re okay with that, then maybe you don’t need anything more than just someone taking care of it part time. But if you’re in a position like most people are, where if they were to lose that SQL Server, it would have a pretty serious impact on the business, or would cost a lot to rebuild it or get it back, then we want to look at how to take care of that.
So oftentimes, if you’re in that one SQL Server shop, you’re often not a super big business. Oftentimes it’s small to medium sized businesses that just have the single SQL Server, and you don’t really have the budget to hire a full time DBA you don’t want to hire someone at 100 $250,000 a year in order to be able to take care of that one server. But the flip side is then you get the IT generalist, or even someone who specializes in something else that has to work on it, and they just don’t have the right skills to take care of that. So you end up with the risk of inadequate database management, and you end up then with things like performance slowdowns or data corruption or security vulnerabilities or downtime things like that. I think that some of the common pain points that we run into when a SQL Server is not being taken care of correctly is things like inconsistent backups or lack of testing the recovery plans, which can really increase the risk of data loss.
Just a half hour before recording this video, we sat down Derrick and I with one of our clients on a teams call, and we went through and did a practice restore of one of their databases, just to prove that everything’s good with the backups and that we can do and that they can do that emergency restore when it’s needed. If it’s not your primary duty, you might often not be doing that kind of things. Another thing that you run into, if you’re just a generalist trying to take care of that SQL Server, is you may not know where to go when there’s poorly optimized queries or indexing issues that lead to slow performance on your SQL Server. I don’t know how many times we’ve heard from people they ask us to help them with a performance assessment in order to make things run faster and better. And then we find out that, well, gee, it’s never have any statistics maintenance, or it hasn’t had any index maintenance, and those kind of things, ever we go in, we get those turned on, we get them fixed up, and oftentimes that can help with performance, but also they don’t have the experience to take it to that next level.
Another area that that gets missed a lot with that single SQL server environment is patching and updates a lot of the time. Maybe you know how to do all the windows updates and make sure that things are good, but are you getting all those SQL server security patches and SQL server updates? Not all of them are included in the normal Windows update process. Now, not doing those exposes the servers to security risks. If we lived in a perfect world where there were no bad guys out there and nobody with ransomware or other worms or things like that trying to get in the system, maybe this wouldn’t be a concern, but the fact is, we live in a world where we’re continuously under attack by those type of bad actors, and neglected patching can really open the exposure there for you and your environment to the point you could possibly lose your SQL Server.
Then the other thing that comes up is, if you don’t have the right expertise in house, you have difficulty troubleshooting issues like blocking, like deadlocks or corruptions or corruption without that deep SQL expertise, there’s a lot, as we go through this, I’m going to talk about there’s a lot of ways we can help with that, but there’s also tools like Database Health Monitor that we have that can help you so you can do it yourself.
So a real world example here that I want to share, we’re working with a client, and of course, I’m not going to share any client names with this, but they had one SQL Server, so just the one SQL Server shop, like we’re talking about here. And every morning, when they would run their sales reports, and they had, I don’t know, 15 or 20 people on the sales team that would all be running these sales reports at the same time those would be run, and it would take out the SQL server performance. Their entire assembly line would stop working, because all those reports had such a heavy load on the server, they didn’t have the ability, the in house skills to figure out how to fix that. So what we were able to do with the performance engagement is go in and get that sorted out for them and come up with a solution that made it so they could run all those reports as frequently as they needed every morning by their sales team and without impacting the overall performance of the SQL Server. A lot of different options for how that can happen, depending on the different environments, but we will help them get up and running. And gosh, it’s been probably two and a half years since we did that one, and they’re still running good.
So why does SQL Server management matter? Well, like I said earlier, if your SQL Server is critical to your business, if it’s the backbone of your operations, of customer data or financial records or application data, things like that, well, you don’t want to lose that. And you need to look at, well, what is the real cost of downtime? And there’s a lot of different factors that go into that and lost revenue. So if the SQL Server you have is somehow impacting the ability for your company to take in money or to deliver product. Well, that can really impact your revenue. If it’s something where orders are coming from a website or orders are being placed by sales people into the system, how’s it going to look if the sales people said, “Sorry, I can’t sell you that because our system’s down. Come back later. Try us next month”, could put it in, put you in a pretty bad position there. So one of the cost of downtime is lost revenue because orders or sales are unable to be placed or products unable to be delivered.
The next is customer trust as well, and that’s one that’s hard to put, like a real dollar amount on that customer trust. But how does it look to your customers if they call in to place an order, or they call in for support, or whatever it is that you’re helping them with, and you say, sorry, I can’t help you because our SQL server is down. How about if you come back next week? Example of that, I know I talked about this, I think on our ransomware, our backup and recovery podcast, but you. Imagine a healthcare provider was a small regional hospital that contacted me and said, Hey, we’ve been hit with ransomware and we don’t have any backups. And after working with them for a couple hours, it became clear they didn’t have any option to recover. Imagine going into the doctor’s office for like, an elective surgery or your appointment, or whatever it may be at this hospital, and you check in, you give them your name, and they say, gee, we don’t know who you are because we lost all of our patient data. Why don’t you fill out this new customer intake form, or new patient intake form that’s really going to lose trust if they if a hospital or healthcare provider or your bank had something like that happen, and then what about productivity? I mean, if your SQL server is down, how much time is lost, how much how many employees are being paid to do something that they can’t do their job because that servers down, how much lost? Productive, productive, product. Productivity is there, whether it’s from a customer support team or whether it’s from like an assembly line producing product, and they need the SQL server in order to help keep that running.
So really, you want to make sure that you’ve got these things covered, so that those areas are not impacted at the time by outages and things like that. So you want to focus on ongoing performance tuning, and this is if whether you’re the person assigned to work on the SQL Server, or whether you’re subbing it out to someone or asking for help, that ongoing performance tuning is important to ensure that things are running optimally. Now there is another way to get around performance tuning, and that is just to ignore the performance tuning and to throw more and more cores of CPU and more and more memory and bigger virtual machines at it in order for your database to grow. Now that becomes really expensive, and I do kind of mean that in a hopefully you don’t do it position, but some people deal with performance issues just by moving it to a bigger virtual machine and giving it more cores and paying way more for your Microsoft licensing. If you like doing that and can afford doing that, maybe you don’t need someone to help you with performance. But eventually your SQL Server will catch up with you if you’re not taking care of performance, and there will be work that needs to be done, performance tuning work in order to be able to keep using that SQL Server. The other thing is, there’s proactive monitoring that’s needed in order to be able to catch issues before they escalate.
One thing we’ve seen a lot is, because we do database corruption repair, is people contact us, they end up with a corrupt database that can’t be used, and they say, Well, how do we fix it? And we look into it and say, Well, did you have monitoring? Or do you know when the corruption was introduced and if it was introduced in the last couple of days? That’s something that’s usually easier for us to fix than if they say, well, the corruption was introduced in February last year, and we ignored it until now because it didn’t take the system down. So being able to be proactive and catch those things before they knock you out, can make a big difference on your options for how to repair from it, and then making sure you’ve got good, robust backups and disaster recovery strategies. Sometimes I look at it and I say, well, one of the most important things that any DBA has to do is to know how to recover when disaster strikes. And if that first time you’re having to recover from backup. You start out and you go to Google and you say, how do I recover from a SQL Server Backup? Well, that’s not a very good position to be in. You want to be in a position where you’ve practiced those and you know you can get them back. That can be the difference between a quick recovery time, 15 to 20 minutes for certain size databases, versus days of recovery time figuring out what you did wrong on that first attempt.
So practice, practice, practice on backups is and restoring those backups. And you know, next week’s podcast, we’re actually going to talk about the importance of good backups and being able to restore those so I guess that’s kind of a teaser into that. And then the other thing you want to focus on is security measures like encryption and access controls. With SQL Server 2019 and newer, Microsoft introduced their Transparent Data Encryption, which we talked about on a podcast a few weeks ago. And anyone running SQL Server 2019 or newer has the option to run Transparent Data Encryption, which means your data is encrypted at rest. And with that, that means that it makes it more difficult for someone to steal that data. They can’t just go take a backup and restore it somewhere and be able to steal your data. They’ve got to have the right keys in order to make that work. The other thing too to be aware of is the high cost, I know I touched on it briefly earlier, but the high cost of hiring a full time DBA, and when I say that the high cost of hiring a good full time DBA, there’s a lot of DBAs you get out there, real cheap, and then maybe they’re not so good. Worked with some of them over the years. Trust me, you want to make sure you get a good one, but when you’re a small shop, you can’t. Always afford that when it’s not just the salary, but it’s the benefits and the equipment and all of that. I mean, do you have room for another full time employee in your budget or in your office or in the whole plan? And then what do you do when that single full time DBA is out? Hopefully, part of the benefits for anybody you’d hire as a full time DBA would include a vacation. What happens when that DBA takes off on vacation for two weeks this summer and you have a SQL Server outage? Well, we have, gosh, I keep touching on other podcasts we did, we did a DBA on vacation podcast, and we talked about some of the problems that can happen on that. Well, that’s the kind of thing that we can be there to help you with that.
So there’s a lot of things that you really need to know and you need to do to take care of your SQL Server. And part of it we can help you with, with some of our classes. Part of it we can help with, with Database Health Monitor and some of the monitoring and tuning we do in there, as well as some of the alerting. But one of the ways that we can really help a lot is with SQL Server managed services, and this is something where, at Stedman Solutions, we do this regularly. We have a team of US based database administrators. Many of them have over 20 years of experience with SQL Server and providing specialized SQL Server support. Now this is a lot different than hiring someone out of college. And I always say the difference between a senior DBA and a junior DBA is that the senior DBA has already made those mistakes and learn from them, so that they don’t have to make them on your environment, where the junior DBA they haven’t made the mistakes yet, and they’re going to make them on your environment. If you end up hiring someone that’s super junior at that point, you that point, part of what we do is, even though we do have some people involved who are less experienced than that, we always pair them with a senior DBA and someone with less experience, so that we make sure we’ve always got the right coverage to avoid some of those more critical areas. The other thing we do with our managed services is we have an all inclusive pricing model. What this means is we agree on a fixed rate price, and it’s that price every month to take care of all the monitoring, all the maintenance, all the support, all the upgrades and more on those SQL servers. There’s no hidden costs. Now occasionally, you may ask us, with managed services to go take care of something outside of the Managed Services Agreement, take care of another server or help with something else. Yeah, there’s fees with that. But as far as taking care of the SQL Server in question, it is 100% covered, all maintenance, support upgrades and more. Now, as far as labor goes, when we talk about upgrade upgrades, you still have to buy your SQL server licensing, of course, but we’re there to take care of all of your SQL Server DBA needs through that managed services. And the other difference is, too, is we have a proactive approach, where, rather than waiting for something to fail, we work to make sure that the servers are in good shape, and using our proprietary tools? Well, we have our public tool, database, health monitor that anybody can buy, but we also have proprietary tools built off of that that give us additional things like 24/7 monitoring and alerting when something goes wrong, all kinds of checks so that if something happens that puts you at risk, where your backup is not going to be good. Well, we know about it, so we can deal with those kind of things earlier.
Some of the key benefits that we have with that managed services is that we can help stabilize and give you optimization. We take care of the SQL Server, get it running well for you, figure out how to performance, tune it, make it run faster, and basically put you in a position where you don’t have to worry about it. And when I say worry about it, several of our customers that we’ve talked to said one of the things that we really give them, besides the DBA skills, is peace of mind. And peace of mind, meaning that they don’t lay awake at night thinking about their SQL Server and what happens if something goes wrong. They know we’re there to take care of it. We also include that proactive monitoring. We help you with the security and compliance for things like implementing Transparent Data Encryption. Yeah, if you need help with that, sure you can talk to us. You can hire us to help you do it on an hourly gig or with the managed services. We can do it as an all in option to make sure you’re taken care of. And we include reporting and status updates so we know that TDE is working well over time, we help with disaster recovery. We help make sure that you prepare, you are prepared for a disaster, and then if disaster strikes, well, we do what we can to help you fix it. Well, we do what we can. We do. We do more than that. Example is one of the clients we worked with. I think it was month two that we were working with them under Managed Service Agreement. They got hit with ransomware totally unrelated to anything we’d worked on. We probably put in, I don’t know, 80 to 100 hours, I’m just trying to guess, remember, at that maybe over 100 hours that month between two of us at the time, to make sure that we were able to get all their systems back up and running. And that was the kind of thing it would have. In a game over scenario for them, had we not got those servers up and running, but because of that, that was included in the same fee that they would have paid the next month when we weren’t working 100 plus hours on it, and it didn’t cost them anything extra. I don’t like to use the word insurance, but we’re there to cover. When things happen, we will get you back up and going. A big part of that is our focus on making sure that we’ve got disaster recovery taken care of, to meet your expectations, whether it’s just off Site Backups, or whether we’re doing log shipping or something else.
We had one client we worked with. We got them set up. I think it was about month three of working with them, we got them all set up with log shipping from one data center to another data center in a different region, and something happened in their primary data center, literally, the day we were finishing the log shipping setup that other data center got knocked out, and they completely lost access to that data center for several days. Had we not had that log shipping in place, they would not have been able to keep running their business based off of that, but because we had log shipping running as their disaster recovery scenario, we just activated the SQL servers on that other data center. It took us about an hour because it was the first time doing it with them. Now we’ve got the process all scripted, and we probably do it in about 10 minutes, but they had disaster recovery and business continuity taken care of because we had taken we’d built that all out as part of that managed service.
The other thing with this is we can help with that one server environment in a very cost effective manner. When you look at the cost of hiring a full time DBA, we’re far less than that, way less than that, for taking care of that single SQL Server. And the other thing is, we don’t give you just a single person to take care of that. We give you a team of two or three, sometimes four people to make sure you’re covered, so that if I’m on that team and I’m out on vacation, well, you know that two or three of our other team members have you covered so you’re never left hanging because someone’s out of the office or on vacation or out sick or whatever it may be. The other thing that we offer with a managed services is we have mentoring and training. We can do monthly meetings, weekly meetings, or bi weekly meetings as needed, in order to be able to work with you and your team to make sure that we’re giving you the information so you know your servers are taken well care of and that your team is learning along the way. We like to educate so that you know more your team knows more, so that you can be in better shape to handle these things on your own down the road. Also, we offer free access to all of our Stedman solutions, online SQL Server courses that they vary in a number vary in price, from five to $10 up to several $100 those are all free or not free, but included in the package for you and your team at no extra charge for that flat monthly rate for managed services.
So how it works? Well, we have a dedicated team of three or four DBAs that get assigned to work on your specific server. We will make sure that we’ve got a clear contact list there, so you know who’s the lead and who to contact next, and that we know who to contact on your end, primary, secondary things like that, so that when something goes wrong, we can get things taken care of quickly. We need secure access through VPN and RDP, other things like that, to the servers, and then once we’re up and going, when things come up, we jump in for immediate issue resolution when needed, based off of the SLAs that we have on our response times. Okay, an example of the immediate issue resolution one of our clients we have under Managed Services yesterday morning, got a message from them, a text that said we’re having some severe performance issues. Can we jump on a call? And they sent me a teams invite for five minutes later, and within five minutes, we were on troubleshooting and figuring out what were the performance issues on their server and how to take care of them, how to get them cleared up so that they’d be able to perform well going forward, all right, so moving forward, here’s some tips and things for if you choose to do it yourself, some of the best practices. And these are things that are important, whether you’re doing it yourself or whether we’re helping you with it. But they should be done, first off, regular, regularly testing backups and ensuring that they’re recoverable. One of the things I’ve said time and time ago again, is that you don’t know if your backups are really good until you’ve recovered them. It’s just like, Yeah, I’ve got a backup there. And I don’t know how many times I’ve talked to people and they say, Yes, we have a backup. And we go and find out that they weren’t backing up the right things, or they didn’t have a full database backup, or they whatever.
So the key the recommendation is there is that you do regular backup testing, and as long as you know you’ve got good backups, somewhere safe and that they’re recoverable, that can help you out of a whole lot of problem situation. Next you want to use things like Database Health Monitor, which is the product we make for monitoring your system and different alerting to be able to track basic server health metrics. With that, we can help you put. Put you in a position where you know when things are getting into trouble, so you can deal with them before they happen, or as they happen, and react quicker to get them dealt with. You also want to have someone who can help edit and audit what you’re doing to avoid common mistakes in SQL, our season two, Episode 11, podcast, we talked about common SQL mistakes with things like functions in the JOIN clause or neglecting index maintenance, things like that. So check out that podcast episode. There’s a lot of good tips in there, but part of being that one server shop, and if you’re going to do it on your own, is to know when to call in the experts. I would say probably 95% of the day to day operations on that SQL Server. They’re good. Anybody with a little bit of training can probably cover them. But there’s those that last 5% that things can get serious where you need to call in experts to help you. Recurring performance issues are one of them, backups that are continuously failing, or backups that you don’t know how to restore. Well, we can help figure that out security concerns, and I think that with whatever you’re doing, just to know where your line is and knowing who you’re going to call when you need help. I mean, it’s no different than me. I’ve got a couple rental properties, and I always need to know what’s the plumbing company that I’m going to call because I don’t want to do plumbing work. I’m not going to clean out clog sewers and things like that. So I know that when something happens at one of those properties and I need help, I call a plumber, because that’s outside of my skills and outside of anything that I have any desire to work on. Well, similar thing here with your SQL Server, you need to know when to call in the experts so that they can we can help when you have issues.
So at this point, there’s a lot here to sort of comprehend on this. We just want to make sure that if you need any help, we have a free 30 minute consultation. If you go to Stedman.us/schedule, you can schedule a free 30 minute consultation to assess what we could do to help with your SQL Server, or to just figure out what you need to do to help with your SQL Server. Check out the Stedman Solutions website for resources like white papers and training, and we can help. Just reach out, and we’re there to help take care of you.
Now we got a question that was submitted, and the question was, can Stedman solutions work with older SQL Server versions? And this is a tricky one, because it really depends on how older you’re talking about here. Well, right now, when we’re recording this, it’s 2025 and our answer to this is yes, we’ll go back 20 years. We’ll go back to SQL Server 2005 and onward, including corruption repair on SQL Server 2005 if you need that. Now, the one thing I do ask if you’re going to work with us, is that for any version of SQL Server older than 2014, or roughly older than 10 or 11 years, we ask that you have a goal of moving forward to that newer version. And that’s another thing that that gets often overlooked is doing those upgrades, getting you to that newer version of SQL Server. It’s one thing to pay for the licensing, but oftentimes it’s a much bigger deal to get you moved to that newer version. The actual work involved, we can help you with that in a way that’ll get you to those newer versions of SQL Server safely with a good rollback plan, and in a way that is minimal impact on the business. Example of that is just this next coming weekend. We’re working with a client. They’re doing an upgrade from an older version of SQL Server to SQL Server 2022 we’ve been working on it for a little while, having a test environment, and now we got it ready to go, and we’ll do the upgrade this weekend. We’ve got a rollback plan. We’ve got ways to test and confirm it all works, and we’ll get them in a position where they have a more supported environment going forward. So next question, hopefully that answers the SQL Server older versions. Frankly, if you’ve got a system that’s working on SQL Server 2000 or something older than that. Come on, we gotta, I mean, if you’re that far out of date, odds are you’re probably going to never go forward on that one. So hopefully you’re not in that position. So next the question came in is, how does managed services differ from hiring a consultant? And really, the difference is here with a consultant, or just a person on contract. Often times you’re dealing with just one off fixes, or they’re focused on really how much hourly billing can they do, quite often in order to be able to get things done, whereas with managed services, we have a flat rate.
So our goal is to take care of your servers to the point that you need as little help as possible. But we’re there to take care of you when you when you need it. We want to make sure that the servers are in good shape, you’ve got backups in good shape, so that when that disaster happens and we need to recover, we can do that for you quickly, rather than taking days or weeks to get you back online.
So I would like to reach out and say, if anybody has any questions, you can visit the Stedman Solutions website and contact me with those questions, or you can post them on our podcast. So quick recap here. Keep in mind that taking care of SQL Server is, yeah, it takes some specific knowledge that not everyone has, and if you’ve got that great you don’t need any help. But if you need help, we can, we can help you with that. The key things here is having peace of mind to know that when something goes wrong, that you’ll be covered. And if you don’t have that today, reach out. We can help you with that. So visit Stedmansolutions.com or go to Stedman.us/schedule in order to schedule a free 30 minute consultation with me, subscribe to our podcast on Spotify or YouTube to get more tips and insights. I know going through this, I’ve mentioned two or three other podcasts that we’ve gone through that could help if you’re in this position where you’re having to take care of a SQL Server on your own, and then download Database Health Monitor for a free trial. Start monitoring your SQL Server today.
And at this point, I want to say thank you for listening and tuning in. Next week’s episode, dive into why you should be testing your restores weekly and how to do it. Very good topic to follow up after this one, because that’s one of the most important things you need to do. So thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Oh, also, I also forgot if you like it, please click the Thumbs Up or the bell icon so you get informed of new podcasts. And if you have any topics you want to have covered on the Stedman SQL podcast, please reach out and just let me know. Thanks for watching. Have a great day. 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.