Finding a skilled SQL Server DBA in today's job market is difficult. Skip the headache of vetting & hiring by working with our SQL Server consultants as your Remote DBA team instead. Many companies rely on a single database administrator but have no plan for when that person is on vacation. Others get caught holding a 2 week notice and need to scramble for a replacement. With the Emergent Remote DBA team in place, you have access to extra capacity, experts to escalate difficult issues to or validate internal work, plus you have coverage for internal PTO and staffing gaps.
Check out the many DBA services we offer and then consider a SQL Server Support agreement to lock in your on-call window and response time SLA. Many companies start with a SQL Server assessment to get a good idea of how much they need expert SQL Server DBA services.
SQL Server Assessment: Health Check & Security Audit
Your system and network admins may think everything is up to snuff with your database environment, but we know from assessing SQL Server environments for many businesses across a variety of industries that most database servers are poorly configured. In fact, many times, very small changes lead to significant improvements in performance and reliability. And since environments are constantly changing with growing data size, newly added databases, new reports, changing permissions, etc. regular health checks and security audits are a must.
Despite how important security should be with regards to your data, database security is often misconfigured and overlooked. Because SQL Server is typically configured with mixed authentication, you cannot rely on the rules you have configured in Active Directory. Have you reviewed the sysadmin and database owner logins recently? Do your users and application logins have more permissions than needed? SQL Server expertise is needed to answer these questions.
Contact us today to get an outside party assessment and security audit of your environment. Check out this sample SQL Server Assessment to get an idea of what we produce.
Customized Backup & Maintenance Plans & Monitoring
How confident are you that your databases are properly backed up? Have you validated your recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO)? Your IT staff might tell you they’ve got that covered with 3rd party backup software, but many questions remain:
- Are backups properly compressed saving both space and improving backup performance?
- Are encryption keys stored properly so that databases can be restored to a different server?
- Are the databases being checked for integrity (restoring backups containing corruption isn’t going to help)?
- Are backup jobs configured with alerts to email addresses that are still monitored?
SQL Server database administrators at Emergent Software can help you answer these questions—contact us today!
SQL Server Best Practices Installation & Configuration
Much of what we find in our database health checks can be avoided if SQL Server is configured correctly when installed. Don’t rely on your system administrators or report developers to install and configure SQL Server by clicking through the wizard accepting the defaults. Contact Emergent before your virtual machines are built and we’ll make sure your database environment is configured with best practices to maximize your infrastructure investments.
SQL Server Infrastructure Consolidation
SQL Server is so “easy” to install, that it often is found all over your network leading with servers at different patch levels and a difficult web to managed. Potentially, you’re way out of compliance with your SQL Server licenses from Microsoft. Our database team can help you determine what servers and databases are still being used, what can be archived, and what can be consolidated into fresh, properly configured SQL Server virtual machines.
High Availability Clusters
Your most important systems that require 24x7 operation with little to no downtime need high-availability SQL Server clustering. Emergent’s SQL Server experts help IT leaders choose the right SQL Server cluster technology given your high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) needs and budget. We perform best practice configurations of Availability Group (AG) clusters and traditional standard failover (FCE) clusters.
Database Disaster Recovery
How much data loss can you tolerate when disaster strikes? How much time can you operate without your database systems being online? Answering these questions and validating that you can achieve your recovery goals is key to your business functionality at the highest level regardless of what happens. Your IT team may have DR plans in place for your servers and infrastructure, but without SQL Server expertise, you might be exposed to potential data loss and an inability to quickly get your core business applications up and running when their plan is executed. Emergent’s SQL Server DBA’s can make sure your databases are configured with a recovery strategy that matches your recovery expectations.
System Performance
Database performance is a nebulous topic because rarely is someone actually experiencing a slow database directly. Usually, we’re talking about an application that is performing badly and the database gets the blame. Because of this, our database team has become adept and examining performance wholistically and identifying potential bottlenecks which could be network bandwidth, storage latency, virtual machine configuration, drive configuration, SQL Server configuration, blocking, locking, missing indexes, query optimization, resource contention with other processes, etc.
SQL Server Patching & Upgrades
Unless you subscribe to Microsoft’s SQL Server release blog, your database environment will quickly accumulate known security holes and eventually become out of support. Our database team pays close attention to the SQL Server patch & cumulative update release schedule, waits an appropriate time for the dust to settle, and then schedules with our clients to perform patches off hours, avoiding downtime.
Database Development Services
In addition to all the production DBA services listed above, our team includes expert data architects and database developers who can help with the following database development services:
- Query performance tuning and optimization
- Missing index analysis and maintenance
- Stored procedure development
- ETL development & maintenance
- Power BI & SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) development
- Database design and data model reviews
- Data warehousing
SQL Server Support - On-Call Window & Response Time Commitment
Ensure our team is available to provide critical support and respond to your ad-hoc requests in a timely manner by combining our remote DBA services with an on-call windows and response time SLA that meets your company needs:
| Service | Bronze | Silver | Gold | Platinum |
| Critical Issue Response |
Within |
2hr Response Business Days 7am - 6pm CT |
2hr Response 365 Days/Year |
60min Response 365 Days/Year 24/7 |
| Non-Critical Issue Response within One Business Day | checkmark | checkmark | checkmark | checkmark |
| Guaranteed Professional Services Hourly Rate | checkmark | checkmark | checkmark | checkmark |
| Report Issues Online using Emergent SQL Support Portal | checkmark | checkmark | checkmark | |
| Proactive SQL Server Patching | checkmark | checkmark | checkmark |
Have business-critical production databases?
If you answered “Yes” to this question and don’t already have SQL Server focused monitoring tools in place with staff available to quickly respond to critical issues during all hours of business operations, then you should contact us about our SQL Server Managed Services which takes SQL Server Support to the next level by adding real-time monitoring & alert response by our database team.
