Oil and Gas Firm Drills Down to Quickly Resolve SQL Server Issues

THE CHALLENGE

The challenge for this Fort Worth-based oil and gas firm’s IT department was how to manage more servers, more efficiently.
This firm’s IT staff needed SQL Server solutions to help them monitor, diagnose, and optimize the more than 2,000 databases on 50 Microsoft SQL Servers.

THE IDERA SOLUTION

A combination of IDERA’s SQL Diagnostic Manager and SQL Doctor have empowered this IT staff to more effectively manage the health, performance, and availability of their SQL Server environment. With SQL Diagnostic Manager, they can pinpoint performance problems before they become major issues. Leveraging the corrective measures suggested by IDERA’s SQL Doctor, administrators, developers, and analysts can now drill down into solutions to quickly diagnose and cure SQL Server performance issues and potential problems.

As part of an IT group responsible for supporting the systems operations of a fast-paced oil and gas company located in Fort Worth, Texas, systems analyst Joel Rickertsen has a wide range of duties. His primary focus is on the company’s 50 SQL Servers that range in size from 1-2 TB running on virtual machines to much larger databases that are clustered for fault tolerance. “We use SQL Server for many things, including monitoring the wells, production data, and how to run the wells. We also have monitoring systems that run safety systems in case a tank overflows,” he explained. As a result, being able to diagnose performance issues and identify server resource bottlenecks to make sure SQL databases are running at peak performance is critical to the company’s success.

POWERFUL PERFORMANCE MONITORING AND DIAGNOSTICS

Working for a company that is very careful about adding additional staff, Rickertsen explained that they were seeking a SQL Server performance and monitoring solution that could help them manage more servers in a more efficient manner. The firm’s servers also house critical back-end information, such as SharePoint, financial information, and custom in-house engineering applications. “Basically, we have about 2,000 databases that we support that cover a wide range of information,” Rickertsen said. Many of the company’s smaller locations across the U.S. have print and file servers. “With 50 SQL instances, some type of solution was needed. We started looking at different things across the industry, and we came up with three or four possible solutions,” he said.