- Hosts: Steve Stedman / George Stedman / Mitchell Glasscock / Shannon Lindsay
- Topic: Stedman Solutions Managed Services
- Recording Date: April 16th, 2026
Managed Services Stedman SQL Podcast Sn 3 Episode 8
The podcast episode discusses Stedman Solutions’ SQL Server managed services offering, highlighting its unique approach and benefits. Key points include the team’s extensive experience, the availability of multiple team members for 24/7 coverage, and the comprehensive support provided for a flat fee. The team emphasizes proactive monitoring, performance tuning, and custom optimizations. They also offer tools like Database Health Monitor and Stedman SQL School for free to managed service clients. The discussion covers the importance of backups, the risks of not having proper coverage, and the cost-effectiveness of their services compared to hiring a full-time DBA or using offshore or junior DBAs.
Podcast Transcript
Shannon Lindsay 00:15
Today’s topic is our SQL Server managed services offering. But first, let’s take a look at our most popular episodes.
Steve Stedman 00:25
If you’ve missed out on these previous episodes, please take a look at some of the most popular episodes from season one and season two. First off, we had our indexing episode, which was one of the most popular. And you can get that at stedman.us/episode2.4. Another popular one was the building your career episode. A short URL for that is stedman.us/episode2.22 our third most popular episode was JOIN types, and you can get that at stedman.us/episode1.12.
Well, this week’s topic is our SQL Server managed services. I guess let’s, let’s just jump into it with starting out with there’s a lot of SQL consultants out there, a lot of people trying to do, trying to help people with SQL Server, and we take a different approach to it. Part of what we’re doing here is that the team you’ve got here, plus a couple other team members, is the core Stedman Solutions team that manages, takes care of all of our clients with managed services. We have Derek and Bill also, but they weren’t able to make the podcast today. So really, what we just want to do is share with everyone like what we’re doing with managed services and why it’s different than why we might stand out from someone else you might be talking to about database services. So what do you guys think are some top items on why we stand out or why we’re different there?
Mitchell Glasscock 01:47
I mean, I’ll throw one out there. I think looking at it, most consultants are just a single person, single entity consultant for your SQL Server, which means you only get the coverage of one individual working hours. It’s only a quarter of the actual week with our managed service offering, you get three to four team members, and that can cover the entire week, day and night, as far as coverage.
Shannon Lindsay 02:12
Yeah. And on top of that, the experience level of our team, everybody varies in different specialties and backgrounds and just, you know, it, like I said, is a team. So, whatever the customer needs, we match the team members to that, and I really try to do what’s best for that customer specifically.
Steve Stedman 02:37
Yep, that’s a good point. I think with that, one of the things I really like to do with our managed service customers is in that very first meeting we have, where we’re really trying to understand what it is that they need and what where are the areas that they need help is to match those team members, like you said, Shannon, just specifically the right fit for that group. You’re not just getting someone because they’re a warm body that we’re trying to put in a in a seat to make money. You’re getting the right person in order to be able to take care of your servers there. And, yeah, that’s definitely a good point. Another area there that I mean, I think, with when we take care of the servers with managed services is that really, we’re there to do everything around taking care of that SQL Server to make sure it’s going to be solid, it’s going to have good backups, it’s going to perform well all of the things that a SQL server needs to do to work well in in your environment. And everyone has slightly different needs there, but we do that all for one flat fee. There’s no nickel and diming add ons to say, Well, gee, you had more problems this week with performance, so we’re going to charge you extra. Now, if you ask us to work on something outside of your SQL Server, we might charge you extra for that. But anything that’s related to that SQL Server, that’s just a single price for everything you take care of there, everything we take care of there.
Mitchell Glasscock 04:00
So I think that adds to the point. I mean, we already covered you get a lot of team members, but we also have shuffled team members around to different projects. If we’ve come across a problem for one customer that we have a team member that just shines in fixing that, it’s pretty common for us to bring them into the fold just to focus on that problem and then back away once they’re done with it. So we have the flexibility, even if the three team members that you have right now aren’t specialized in that we have people that are going to specialize in whatever problem you can come across.
Steve Stedman 04:37
And those things might apply to performance tuning, or SQL Server replication or availability groups, or TDE, or working with big data, or doing system upgrades. And I mean, there’s a lot of different things that different team members specialize in there. And I know like one of those good example is like with. TDE, I know Derek’s done it a lot more than I have. I can do it, but he does it better. So we always like to include him, just an example there.
George Stedman 05:09
I would say also to kind of move into that point is we also work like day to day consistently with many different clients. So maybe we’ll find a performance insight for one client, and then we’ll apply that to everyone else. So like, I mean, to go back to one of the previous podcasts, was we found that one of our clients was using the Convert implicits all over the place, and well, this week and last week, I think we’ve been looking for those in a bunch of clients, and we’ve been saving them a lot of CPU time and in IO.
Steve Stedman 05:44
yeah, another interesting example of that. I mean, just yesterday, I was working with one client in the morning, and I wrote a script to go find some specific performance thing, and then I was on a call in the afternoon with a different client, and I needed that exact same script. I just went and grabbed what I hadn’t even saved it yet. It was still open in Management Studio for me. I went and grabbed what I’d done there and brought it over and used it at the other client. There was nothing client specific in it, but it was all about being able to use tools and reuse those tools across clients to be stronger. And I think that kind of leads us into tools. It also leads into Database Health Monitor, which we haven’t even mentioned yet. So I think there’s a lot of consultants out there that you might talk to who, when you’re looking at working with them, they say, I have to have some product that you’re going to buy that might be 1000 to $10,000 a year extra. That’s you have to add in on top of what their fee is in order for them to be able to do their jobs. Well, we have Database Health Monitor, an application that was built in house and designed around us doing our job with managed services, and it’s a tool that we just include for all of our clients at no extra charge. All of our managed service clients get that. And so there’s nothing else you have to shell out for tooling on top of that, of course, you have to buy your SQL Server licenses. We we’re not going to get you around, get around that, by any means. But as far as the monitoring tools, yeah, we bring it all with us, so that there’s no extra fees that you’re going to have to run into there.
Shannon Lindsay 07:16
Yeah. And I think going off of, off of not only Database Health Monitor. But like being able to offer our clients the Stedman SQL School. So even if there’s, like, little things that aren’t included, that you know, like we said, even with team members, certain people just specialize in different things. So same goes with our clients. They might be really specific into one side of things. But with the Stedman SQL school, we cover all the different topics, and that comes free for the customers too, to be able to say, Hey, there’s this class you can take, or there’s this class you can take, and I mean short, just very informative topics that are so accessible for our clients.
Steve Stedman 08:01
And like Shannon said, for those managed service customers, there is no extra charge for any of those classes. If you need of our what we got about a dozen classes out there. If you need all of those for one person on your team, no problem, you got it. If you need all of them for 50 people on your team, no problem. They’re all available. No extra charge for any of that. Now, if you’re not a managed service customer, you got to pay the retail rate on those. But for the managed service the managed service customers, we include that everything. It’s just an all in, all inclusive kind of deal.
Shannon Lindsay 08:28
Yeah, so a couple different that make it different. I mean, not only have I kind of noticed that other companies that do similar things to what we do. I’ve noticed with our managed service offering, like there’s very specific things that you don’t find anywhere else, and I think that kind of helps put us just a little bit above the rest.
George Stedman 08:55
I would say, just to speak on that, like one of the biggest things that we do is we kind of tailor the managed service experience to each client, because every single, every single person that hires us has a different need. And I mean, I would say like we’re not. There’s a lot of clients where we work with their DBAs, even like we don’t replace their DBAs. We supplement their DBAs with the classes, with Database Health Monitor, with all that to make their overall like SQL infrastructure stronger.
Steve Stedman 09:28
Yep, yeah. I mean, that’s a great point. I mean, some of our clients that we work with managed services are using homegrown applications that they built their software development companies, basically, and they use the SQL Server with that. Others, they’re using an off the shelf product, and they have really no input or no ability to change the application. With those two environments, we treat that very differently on what we can bring as solutions, but we work well, and we work great in both of those environments in order to meet the client’s needs. Simply what they’re going for there.
Mitchell Glasscock 10:01
To kind of piggyback off of that conversation of like each client has a different need. It’s one of my favorite things about the job, in particular, is that every day there’s a different need from a different client. There’s never the same thing every single day, and that just grows. I mean, that’s made everyone’s experience tenfold as wide as if you were just finding a TBA that’s only worked at one company for the past 20 years. They’ve only seen the same thing every single day, versus our team members have seen something different every single day.
Steve Stedman 10:34
And I think that’s a really good point. I mean, that’s the life of a consultant, is that you are on so many different environments, and what you’re learning on those on one client may help on the next one, not anything client specific, but just about the SQL Server topics that we’re doing there.
Shannon Lindsay 10:52
So within that, you know, like we’ve said a couple different times, our clients all have different needs. So I’ve noticed that with our managed services, there’s kind of two different levels that we can offer for service. Do you kind of want to cover that one?
Steve Stedman 11:12
Steve, yeah, and I guess that’s where we have our agile and then our always available option. And I think that I mean with that the MO, well, actually all the clients we’ve worked with take our agile solution, which is basically with that, we’re offering support, really through service level agreements like Monday through Friday, 7am to 7pm but outside of that, we are also supporting you. We’re doing scheduled maintenance. We’re doing updates and things like that, after we go through the details of the Agile versus the high availability one, where we really would staff someone 24/7, on it. Most people who are, I mean, all the people on the Agile solution, they know they can call us up at three o’clock in the morning if that’s what’s needed in order to keep the system running. And with that, we make it real clear that I’d rather get a call from you guys for the client at three o’clock in the morning, rather than waiting till seven o’clock or eight o’clock in the morning when things have got worse. I mean, so yeah. So with that, it’s really just the level of support. And even with our basic agile one that we have, it’s pretty comprehensive, and we’ve never run into an issue where someone had to wait through the weekend or through the night in order to be able to get support from us. We’re pretty much always there, and that’s part of the thing with the staffing of the team, like we talked about earlier, is that even if we may not be scheduled to be doing something for you on Saturday at two o’clock in the afternoon, for instance, or even two o’clock in the morning. If something goes wrong, there’s probably most likely one of our team members is available to help at that point. Okay, so one of the things we’ve seen with a lot of people who have come on as new managed service customers is like it? It’s really not if something goes wrong, it’s when. Because I think when you’re working with a SQL Server, when you’re working with anything in tech, something will eventually go wrong. It’s guaranteed. But one of the key things that we do is we take a real proactive approach to monitoring and support so that we can see those issues as they’re starting to happen, so that we can deal with them and get them dealt with before they become too much of a problem. An example of this is the other thing we do is a little bit of corruption repair here and there. And the thing we’ve seen with real world examples there is that someone calls up, they’re not a managed service customer, and they say, I’ve got this corrupt database. And we get to talking to talking to them, and they said, well, corruption was discovered last week, but it looks like it’s been going on for about eight months, and that we had, we have backups, but they don’t actually work, which means you don’t really have backups, but that’s the kind of thing that’s a real world example. That’s a tough spot to be in, and with that, with our managed service customers, we make sure that you will never be in that position. I mean, the top priorities are making sure that we’ve always got good backups and always able to get you back up and going if something does go wrong.
Mitchell Glasscock 14:11
Well, going back to that like nickel and diving conversation that you said, once we have you as a managed service customer, even if we find that corruption or corruption happens, it’s a covered item. It’s covered under the Services. It’s not like we’re saying, Hey, you’re gonna have to pay 10,20, $30,000 to fix this. It’s Nope, we’re gonna, we are working with you. We are gonna fix that now.
Steve Stedman 14:35
Yep. Perfect example of that is one of our managed service customers that we’ve worked with for, gosh, I think about six and a half years now, great customer. We love working with them. But month two or month three, with working with them, they got hit with ransomware. It was unrelated to anything we had done. It came in through some other systems that we weren’t part of, but it eventually got to the SQL Server, and in that environment, it took completely rebuilding all of their SQL. Servers in their environment and restoring from backups and completely rebuilding from scratch. And that’s something that between Derek and I, who were the two working on at that point in time, we probably spent close to 80 hours, I don’t know. Story probably changes over time as I tell it, but probably about 80 hours getting their entire system back up and running. And it was a difference between whether they would have been in business. Have been in business or not, and in doing that 80 hours times any hourly rate exceeded what they pay monthly. But we didn’t charge them any extra that month, because it’s just part of the service we know other months we might it might seem like maybe there’s a little bit less being done, and it just all balances out. And we know that we would rather have a happy customer for the long term, even if it means we got to work our butt off one month to do far more than we normally do. We’re happy to take that on, to keep the customer, customer happy and to keep the systems running.
Shannon Lindsay 15:52
I think that’s how a lot of people actually end up finding us too. Is it starts either as like a corruption repair or something has gone wrong, and first thing they do is, you know, Google help, and we’ve popped up a couple different times. And even if it doesn’t start out as a managed service customer, it starts out as even just something small, and then they work into it.
Steve Stedman 16:19
Okay, so I guess, I mean, that’s one of those things that with that, once you’re a managed service customer and we’re working with you, we have all the tools. We have Database Health Monitor in place. We’re tracking things. And rather than having that traditional like break, fix reaction thing where something goes wrong and we react and fix it. Yes, we will do that if it happens, but we are doing ongoing performance tuning, health checks and custom optimizations to make sure that databases run at their peak efficiency, and we have alerting and things like that in place so that oftentimes we know that something’s going wrong before the system goes down, so that we can react and deal with that, so that it does not go down. And one of those, I mean, the key tool set that we built around that is Database Health Monitor. So speaking of Database Health Monitor, here’s a word from our sponsors.
Is your SQL Server slowing down, your business slow queries, bottlenecks and unexpected issues eating up your time, introducing Database Health Monitor, the powerful tool built by our team at Stedman solutions, get real time insights into performance with over 100 built in reports, index analysis, weight stats tracking and proactive alerts, quickly diagnose and find problems before they impact your operations with an easy to use interface for DBAs and developers, monitor unlimited servers, tune queries and keep your databases running healthy and fast. Download a free trial today Databasehealth.com and take control of your SQL server performance.
All right? Well, that brings us, I think, to the hidden risks of doing nothing, meaning, just keep going without a without the right coverage on your SQL Server. So I don’t know, what do you guys think are some of the real, real world risk that we’ve seen that may, may come into play if somebody does nothing and doesn’t have the right coverage there.
Mitchell Glasscock 18:27
The scariest one is no backups, or thinking you have backups that don’t work. Like you said, it’s a very, very difficult situation to come back from if something is to happen, corruption, ransomware, this, that, or the other million different things can happen. And if you think your backups are good.
Steve Stedman 18:46
You know, that’s the interesting one, because we could probably do a whole other podcast just on the stories of phone calls I’ve got from people who needed help. And they could have had it. It would have been a trivial fix if they’d had backups, but they didn’t have any backups in place, not our managed service customers, but those were just people who called us up fresh contact there. Yeah. I mean, another big risk with that is performance degradation over time. I mean, we’ve seen a lot of, I mean, a lot of systems where we get called in for performance help, and they said, Yeah, we’re great four years ago, but it just keeps getting slower and slower every single month, and that’s a challenge to come in once it’s down the road and we’ve got to do a full performance assessment. But if we can catch those things along the way and continue to improve that month over month, then it never gets to that really bad point.
George Stedman 19:36
Yeah, the other one that I can speak to on that that specific risk, is it, it can, like, spiral out of control, and then we, we, we’ve actually had a few clients where, like, we took them on when performance was really bad, and we actually helped optimize a lot of their systems. Get everything organized, get everything set to the point. Were instead of having, instead of them, like previously, they were planning on, like increasing their hardware, like adding more CPU, adding more RAM, adding like, increasing their costs to keep their system running, where, like, a month or two into managed services, they’re actually their CPU and RAM usage was so low that their next upgrade, they they’re now planning on reducing their CPU and RAM and in saving money each month from Azure or Amazon RDS that kind of those services.
Steve Stedman 20:35
Yep. And to add to that, I mean, we even had one client that, after about eight months working with us, we had freed up so much CPU on their system, and there was a physical hardware with 96 cores and with 48 cores per CPU, and they physically on a maintenance window, pulled the server out of the rack, plucked one of the cores out, and went from 96 to 48 cores on a server that, 10 months previous to that, was completely CPU overloaded, and they were able to cut their SQL server licensing in half by pulling out that extra CPU core there, or CPU with 48 cores on it. So yeah, that’s a real, real thing. And almost every time we do a server upgrade, I think we’re going in with less cores than they had before, and saving them money on the licensing there.
Mitchell Glasscock 21:21
That’s a whole other conversation that could be its own podcast, but especially with the move to cloud based services for servers, is the cost scale climbs insanely fast when you have performance problems and you let them just continually get out of hand. I mean it. I know Georgie kind of talked about it, but just letting it roll to the we’ll just upgrade the server next time, or we’ll keep upgrading it. As we get more and more problems can become expensive very fast.
Steve Stedman 21:55
Yeah, it’s cheap a couple of times, but until you, after you’ve done that a few times, it’s just suddenly, yeah, we can’t afford that anymore.
George Stedman 22:03
Well, yeah, it’s a lot of the license. Licensing models are kind of exponential, like they start off cheap, little upgrade, little upgrade, little upgrade, and then all of a sudden, it’s like, whoa. When did it get to be eight times the cost of what we were paying initially?
Steve Stedman 22:16
So let me share an example of a client that a different one that we’ve worked with for a couple of years now, where, when they first came to us, their concern was that they had only single site set up for their SQL Server, and they needed to be high availability during business hours. And they were concerned what happens to their primary data center. We worked with them for their specific environment and what they needed. Log shipping looked like the right solution for them. We got it set up with log shipping going from to a different site in a different state, and, gosh, probably a week or two after we got that log shipping implementation in place, that they had a failure at their primary site, where the primary site went down for over a day. The data center was down for over a day. We were able to help them flip over and get quickly running at that second location, using those databases that were all log shipped over there, and it went from a short blip in their system, where we until we got everything up and running, which compared to what it would have been before, it would have been probably one to three days of downtime, had they not had that in place, what we were able to build out for them in the first couple of months of working with them. So let’s look at some common alternatives, like, let’s say you’re out there and you’re looking at our managed services, and what are the other options versus type of help we provide.
Mitchell Glasscock 23:41
I mean, I think the easiest answer that most companies trend towards is just hire a single DBA, and we can have an entire conversation on the salary comparison between what we cost and what a single DBA costs.
Steve Stedman 23:54
I think that when you do hire that single DBA, in that example, it’s not just cost, but it’s also what is their knowledge, and even if that DBA has 20 or 25 years of experience, they probably don’t have the breadth of experience that we do by having a team of five or six people that we can bring in as appropriate for different scenarios. The other thing related to that full time DBA is, well, that DBA goes on vacation probably sometime. Well, I should say, hopefully your company is a good enough environment that you allow your DBAs to go on vacation. I’ve seen some where they just don’t allow that, and it really leads to grumpy DBAs. What happens when you hire that single DBA? And I mean, whether it’s out sick or they’ve gone to the dentist for two hours or they’re out on vacation for two weeks. I mean, what happens in that environment? Well, that’s the kind of thing where, very rarely is there ever a case where if we assign three or four people to your project, that one of us is not going to be available to help you.
George Stedman 24:56
Another one is the company will be. Hey, our product’s slow. And they’re like, Okay, sysadmin, go find something to fix it. Sysadmin is like, Okay, so maybe we work with this vendor. And the vendor is like, okay, yeah, this tool will work. And it’s a really expensive database monitoring tool. And they’re like, well, we trust our vendor. So they go and get the tool, and then they don’t really know how to use the tool, because they’re a sysadmin, not a DBA, and they do their best to use this expensive tool inefficiently, and it might help a little bit, but it’s probably not worth the price, especially because some of those tools are 1000s, 1000s of dollars a month.
Steve Stedman 25:37
And what we bring is Database Health Monitor so you don’t have to do that at no extra charge for managed service customers. And we’re constantly updating and fixing and not fixing, updating and adjusting it and adding features to specifically help in different client environments. I mean, we added some monitoring on performance stuff not long ago just because of a specific client need, and now, my gosh, it’s being used amongst all of our clients, and it’s been a really great value there. So any other common alternatives that someone might look at if versus us for managed services? I mean, another one that that we’ve seen is offshore or junior DBAs. And if you want the absolute cheapest solution, no matter what? Well, at least the appears to be cheapest, until you have problems, then an offshore or junior DBA, yeah, you can get someone in another country that works for probably 110 of what we work for and won’t have the kind of coverage or experience or tool set that we have in order to be able to get you out of trouble when something happens, or to make sure that the systems are maintained well enough that you don’t get into those troubles to begin with, think availability.
Shannon Lindsay 26:45
I mean, if you’re looking at somebody that’s completely across the other side of the world, your time is not going to be the same. So if you’ve got, you know, an emergency that happens, say, our time, Pacific time, at 8am you’re not looking at somebody that might be on their computer or available until 9pm that night.
Mitchell Glasscock 27:09
It’s kind of funny. Just going off the time zone comment. It’s funny. One of the thing that’s pretty frequently brought up is when prospective clients have questions, is, Where’s, where’s everyone based, and most of our team is based on the West Coast, which gives us an advantage of being able to work in what would be our evenings is pretty much any East Coast clients night time. We do have clients where we wake up earlier. We don’t work normal schedules all the time we wake up a little bit earlier to have earlier East Coast coverages, but we are all US based in the Pacific Time Zone, and that plays a lot to our strengths as coverage.
Steve Stedman 27:52
Yep, just, I mean, just last night, Mitch, I mean, you remember what we’re doing last night around 615 our time it east coast client needed something that couldn’t be done until after 915 Eastern Time, well, and it went through till about 1115 eastern time because of what all was going on with that project. And that was pretty easy for us, because it was 615 pacific time through to what 815 Pacific time. So not so bad. And we’re able to come at something like that a lot fresher based off of that time zone difference. But the other thing we do, and just with our team members, I mean, we have some team members who are more morning people, and we have more others who are more night owls, and we have, like, we may have some team member that’s more willing to do a SQL server updates at 2:30am George, was that what you’re doing this morning?
George Stedman 28:42
Oh yeah, that was, that was last night, after that 815 or 615 meeting.
Steve Stedman 28:48
So, but because of that, we get it all balanced out, and it works well, based off the different team members we have.
George Stedman 28:54
One of the alternatives is hiring a generic MSP managed service provider with maybe they have one in house DBA that’s sometimes has availability for you, and we’re all DBAs so if you need SQL Server support, we’re always available.
Steve Stedman 29:16
Yeah, that’s the interesting thing. And speaking of MSPs, I mean, we’re the one that a lot of the other MSPs call when there’s a real serious SQL issue, we’re not gonna be able to help you with your Outlook or exchange or those kind of things, or your printer hookup, but SQL Server, that’s our specialty, and yeah, we got it covered way better than your typical MSP would have. Okay, so I guess when you’re looking at these different alternatives, I mean, some of the things to consider are, like, the cost versus expertise. I mean, do you want the absolute cheapest solution, or do you want the people with the right experience that may be cheaper than other options that you’re looking at too? I mean, and that’s kind of, we have the expertise and we know what, we know what to do there. The other thing is. Like response time and emergencies. I mean, with three or four people assigned to your project, you’re going to get a lot better response time, no matter what the emergency is, than if you just have one person. And then the other thing is, with a lot of consultants out there, there, there are big hidden costs. I mean, if you I, I guess there’s the old expression when you’re doing consulting is that change orders or additional things like that, is where they really make the money. But with our managed services, we really don’t have change orders or any add ons like that. It’s one flat fee for everything we do, and there’s never any surprises there. Okay, so moving into the next section of like, what are our managed services? What does it actually mean when we talk about SQL Server managed services. How would we describe that?
George Stedman 30:43
I would say, start off with we’ll bring three plus senior DBAs to the table with cumulatively 20 plus years of experience. And then we also bring monitoring with our custom monitoring scripts that we have for managed service clients, as well as monitoring that’s powered by Database Health Monitor.
Steve Stedman 31:03
Okay, great. I mean, that’s, that’s a good start. What else? What else do we bring with our managed services?
George Stedman 31:09
I guess I can keep going. We bring support, unlimited business hours, support. We have fast response times because we have four people getting those alert emails. And I mean, we’re always able to respond to things within the hour, I would say, on any of our managed services that have run into issues a quick Yeah, we’re looking into it within 30 minutes.
Steve Stedman 31:37
Yep. Great example of that was client yesterday at about 2:45pm he texts me and says, we’re having some performance issues. We need some help. What’s your availability? And I said, I’m availability. I’m available right now. Derek’s available a little bit later. We’re here for whatever you need. And about six minutes later, we were on a teams call with them going into the exact details of what they were seeing. I was connected to their server, and we were finding and fixing and addressing the issues right then and there. You don’t get that kind of I mean, we try and do our best for our non managed service customers, but for managed services, we will drop meetings, we will do, I mean, whatever it takes to be there and take care of that. Managed services another big area on what our managed services really is, is mentoring, and I think this is something that makes us very different than a lot of the stereotypical DBAs out there. I mean, coming up, the last 35 years, working with SQL Server, I’ve seen a lot of DBAs who like to build walls and just want to fix things and not tell you what they did to fix it, or not tell you what you can do to prevent it next time. Well, we’re not like that when we do things. We love to teach, we love to share. We love to show what we’re doing so that the client can learn. Because the more the client learns as we go forward, the more powerful, powerful they’re going to be down the road. And we do as much as we can to train and not be that hidden magic behind the curtain. We’re there to make it really obvious and clear and show what we’re doing and teach. So that’s a big benefit. And I know we’ve said it a few times, but the other one is just predictable pricing. It’s just a cost per server. There’s no surprises. It’s just the same month to month, and we got you covered. Okay, so then moving on to how this works in the real world. If someone’s out there thinking I could use SQL Server managed services, how do we go about figuring out what’s what all involved and where we’re going to go with that.
Shannon Lindsay 33:44
I can take this one. I’d say it kind of starts with, you know, we get a contact email or a phone call or something, and most of the time that usually lists out, kind of what their problem areas are, or what they’re looking for. And from that, we kind of figure out who all needs to be involved in an initial meeting, a you know who we are, and you know, go from there and start an assessment. Usually it’s about half an hour, maybe an hour, meeting, and we just kind of get down to the nitty gritty of what exactly is needed and how we can go about helping. Then, you know, from there, we’ll meet as a team and just discuss and kind of reevaluate what we can do best. Usually, we will get an agreement set between what I guess I keep saying needed, but, you know, get, get a contract. Of in place, and from there, we’ll set up, usually another meeting, and outline who the team members are, why they specialize, where they are a good fit for this client, and evaluate the level of support that’s kind of needed.
Steve Stedman 35:20
From there and that meeting, that’s kind of what we call the project kickoff meeting. It’s at the point that the contract sign, we’re getting everyone on the project all together with from our team and the client to just make sure everyone’s on the same page for what needs to be done there. And then from that client meeting, I don’t, I didn’t mean to jump in too much there. Shannon, that’s one of the most important, I think, meetings is it gets everyone on the page, same page is what we want to do, and then after that, start doing all the stuff that needs to be done at that point. And I, I use that, all the stuff that needs to be done, as kind of a real generic term, because every client’s different, we’re going to do that initial evaluation and assessment and figure out what are the things that this client needs. It might be that our most important thing there is we’re now going to go do backups, because they don’t actually have any backups running, and they have no way to recover if they have a disaster or be we have to go fix a corrupt database or something else.
George Stedman 36:18
I would say that like top three things we do as soon as we start work is we make sure that check DB is running, make sure their backups are solid, because we want to make sure that nothing breaks when we’re like, nothing is going to break as when we’re working on your system, right? We want to make sure that there’s no corruption, because that’s bad, and we want to make sure that there’s reliable backup, so that if something does happen, we can go back and fix it as soon as possible. And then after that, it’s generally a lot of ongoing work of just performance tuning. Like we do, a lot of performance tuning for clients, just making sure that their stuff runs as smooth as possible, because the smoother it runs, the less likely it is to do weird stuff like become corrupt.
Steve Stedman 37:08
So one of the key things that we haven’t covered there as well is that once we’ve had that initial kickoff meeting, we usually go into a weekly or in every other weekly meeting with a client, where we meet for a half hour to 45 minutes, and just review what we’re doing, what we’re going to do. I mean, basically, it’s like a stand up, but it’s what’s done, what we’re going to do, and any issues, and we bring up what are the most important things we want to need to work on next? And we just take those all on and make sure those systems are robust. And then when something comes up, like, I don’t know how many times we got a call from different clients and say, somebody goofed and change something in a table. We need to have this table restored, those kind of things. We know that when that happens, we’ve got everything in place. We need to do it.
Shannon Lindsay 37:56
Yeah, and then, basically, like you said, we kind of just get a scheduled meeting going, and keep in contact, and, you know, continued open communication and just there for when you need us.
Steve Stedman 38:12
Yep, and at that point we’re effectively just working as an extension of their team. We’re not really outsiders at that point. We’re there and part of, part of the inner circle to get everything done that they need done. Okay, so if people are listening to this and thinking, Well, is this right for me? So who is managed service? Our managed service offering, really? Who is this for?
Mitchell Glasscock 38:40
I say, if you have a SQL Server, we’re probably going to help you out with it, but anyone who has a SQL Server that needs help right now should really reach out.
Steve Stedman 38:50
So some examples are, maybe you’re not big enough to have a full time DBA, or whatever your company is, or maybe your department’s not big enough to have a full time TVA. Or maybe you do have a DBA, but there’s so many other things going on that that DBA is overloaded with other things as well. There’s environments where we don’t have to be the only DBAs there. We can work with other DBAs, and we do that. We do that as well. So
George Stedman 39:17
I would say another thing that we see a lot of is your DBA is your sysadmin, who’s just jack of all trades, as your company grew, and Jack of all trades, master of none, right? As soon like, the thinner you stretch them, the less they’re going to give attention to each different component that they’re working on, and typically, that the other systems are more important to the sysadmin than databases.
Steve Stedman 39:43
Yeah, the other term I love associated with that is the accidental DBA. Oh, you’re the guy that knows something about it, and you happen to be sitting closest to the SQL Server. Well, you’re the DBA. Call John. He’ll reboot the server because he sits right next to it.
Steve Stedman 39:59
Yeah, I love it when people step up and take things on that are outside of their expertise. But it’s not always the best thing for the most reliability over time. And that’s the thing. I mean, we focus solely on SQL Server. So what we do, we know how to do it right there. What about any others that what this might be for?
Mitchell Glasscock 40:20
We recently did a podcast Steve on upgrading SQL Server versions. I think that’s a great one that we need to we haven’t really talked about this one, but if you’re upgrading your SQL Server version, we do completely in the contract. I believe it’s every two years, we upgrade your SQL Server in as a no added cost to our managed services. So if you’re looking at doing a SQL Server Upgrade, we’re a great place to start. If you don’t know where to start with that, but you know it’s on the horizon, we’re a great place to start with.
Steve Stedman 40:58
Yeah, and that’s not just the upgrade, but it also might be upgrading a move like, let’s say you’re on SQL 2016 you’re trying to get to SQL Server 2025 running on Azure, or RDS, or something like that. We can help with that as well. And that’s just included in the managed service offering. I mean, we’ve got one going on. Gosh, tomorrow night, George, where we’re moving from 2016 to 2022 for a client.
George Stedman 41:21
Yeah, in the cloud.
Steve Stedman 41:22
In the cloud, and that’s just part of the part of what we do.
Steve Stedman 41:27
Okay, all right, so what about like, any objections like that people might think that they don’t need managed services where they really do is there any concerns that, like, people typically share that we’re able to help with.
George Stedman 41:43
I would say that to go off what I just said was, we’re in the cloud. Do we still need this, especially when it comes to backups, for stores, just overall maintenance and performance, I think fast cloud hardware is great. We don’t need a performance tune or we have our cloud backups, but little do they know, those cloud black backups can take up to several hours to restore. We worked with one client to switch. Kind of have a multi backup strategy where we could restore it in minutes, rather than do a full restore of the entire instance in like an hour and a half, so that if they did do that accidental dev table, truncate, we can restore it quickly, rather than how to restore and then move stuff over and fix it.
Steve Stedman 42:35
Yep. Another concern that we come across is Isn’t this expensive, and I think the way our pricing works, because based off the number of servers, it can be very cost effective. And looking at what we’re doing, even if you’ve got a dozen SQL servers, our cost is still less than the cost of hiring a full time experienced DBA for a year. So, and when you look at that, what we always like to look at is, what is the cost of downtime? And that’s really hard to measure. But how much are you really saving if you have us taking care of your servers, and your downtime goes from two days a year down to maybe 10 minutes a year.
George Stedman 43:17
We also, we generally counter that as well with we, like we said earlier, was we get things running so smoothly that you can remove cores from your SQL Server license, or remove cores from your Azure instance, or your RDS instance, like we generally bring monthly savings a few months in just in performance overhead.
Steve Stedman 43:41
And then the other thing we hear is, will we lose control? I don’t know. That’s one of those that like we are there as an extension of your team. It’s not like we’re taking this away from you. We’re taking the work, we’re taking the heavy lifting, we’re taking the pain away from you, but we’re not taking your SQL Server away, and you’ll still have all the access to what you need, you’ll have access to us to help as needed, but you’ll probably, I mean, most people several months to a year into managed services, they probably have more control, because they know what to ask us, and we’ve trained them on how to do things correctly. So
Mitchell Glasscock 44:15
yeah, I mean that you brought up earlier the we’re not hidden DBAs. Or we don’t put up a wall and say, Oh, we fix that. We’re not going to tell you how we fixed it. We’re very, very clear on any change that’s being made to your SQL Server for improvements, not doing anything behind the scenes that you’re not going to know.
Steve Stedman 44:37
All right, well, hey, listeners, if you’re loving these deep dives and mind blowing insights on the Stedman SQL podcast. Imagine getting even more exclusive episodes behind the scenes, bonus content and premium interviews you won’t hear anywhere else. Head over to our YouTube channel right now and hit that subscribe button turn on notifications so you never. Miss out on the content dropping every week, join 1000s already unlocking the full experience, and don’t get left behind. Subscribe on YouTube today. All right, so I think that wraps up most of it. I think what we’d like to do at this point is encourage listeners. If you’re listening and you’re listening and you’re thinking, you might need help with your SQL Server. Here’s a few things you can do. One, evaluate your current server risk. How many SQL servers do you have, and what’s your coverage on them? Try Database Health Monitor. It’s free to download. It’s free to try out, and it is pay once you’ve done to the trial. But it’s probably the cheapest monitoring tool you can find out there and then reach out for a meeting. I mean, go to Stedman Solutions, click on the request a meeting. We can do a 30 minute meeting, absolutely free to talk about what you need help with, what you can do, and what we can do to help you with that. And typically it’ll be probably two of us to figure out how we can help in your specific environment with that. That’s where I would start at this point. So I think then I don’t know anything else you guys can think of on that call to action, of things people to do at this point.
George Stedman 46:18
If there’s any DBAs out there listening to this, or any CIS, or anyone acting as a DBA, what like, just try to restore. How does it go? How quickly can you do it, if it’s not quick, or if you go like, if you restore the wrong thing, or like, if it doesn’t work? Well, you might just want to give us a call.
Steve Stedman 46:38
All right. So some final words here, I guess I mean, SQL Server problems don’t fix themselves, but with the right team, they don’t become disasters either, and that’s what we do. We’re there to make sure you don’t have those disasters. So first covered a lot today, I think this one of our longer podcasts. Guess that happens when you put four of us on the episode to stay so Shannon, George, Mitchell, thank you for being part of this today. And I’d like to thank all the listeners. And if you like this episode or other episodes, please hit the subscribe button and the like button so you get informed of future and upcoming episodes. Thanks for watching, and please reach out to us if you need any SQL Server help, we’re there to help.