When the leading manufacturer of AV automation equipment offered their management system in the cloud, they needed a way to manage their SQL Server databases and guarantee safe keeping of all customer database backups.
We installed PCS DB Health Assist on their Azure VM SQL Server to manage the backups and health of each database. (That is SQL Server running on an Azure VM, not SQL Azure). Later all of the SQL databases were migrated to SQL Managed Instance. SQL Backup and Copy performs nightly backups to a georeplicated BLOB storage for extra safety. This is SQL Server Maintenance Made Easy
SQL Server Maintenance Made Easy
Using the setting for errors and potential issues, management receives reports of all expensive queries, all errors, and all potential issues such as early warning if available disk approaches the minimum required level.
Obviously, the hope is to not receive an email with errors or potential issues, but it is far better to know that there may be trouble lurking ahead than to be blindsided by a SQL Server failure, especially when potentially hundreds of customers can be served by a single SQL server cluster. By setting the option to receive notifications of "No Errors" a daily email is sent with a positive confirmation that all is good as long as there are no issues.
Every now and again an email is received that highlights an expensive SQL query that requires more than a few seconds of CPU time per execution or several thousand reads per row returned. These are generally tuning opportunities that may be tackled in the database or perhaps in the application. Having this information presented across multiple databases is key to being proactive and is an additional step to quality assurance.
SQL Backup and Copy is for applications that use SQL Server, SQL Express, or MSDE
A DBCC Check DB runs every night for each database as does a backup and check for fragmented indexes. Depending on the fragmentation level, indexes are reorganized or rebuilt.
Each backup is zipped using AES 256 encryption and password protected and then copied to Azure Blob Storage for safe keeping.
Since the application is not really transactional but more of an online monitoring tool, simple recovery is a good choice for each database. There are a handful of customers that use the energy management module and those databases use the full recovery model. As such the transaction logs are backed up, zipped and stored every hour.
In addition to all this, the product also manages the size of the database transaction logs, keeping them at or under the desired threshold size.
Using the backup, maintenance, tuning, and early warning features of the product the benefits of PCS DB Health Assist far outweigh the nominal cost of $100. per license. Add the ability to easily create database purge jobs makes the software ridiculously inexpensive.
"DB Health Assistant" DB Health Assist is a database backup, tuning, and health-monitoring service.
One Time Fee $99.99 Download DB Health Assist today and receive a two week free trial.