South Wales Police Department Improves SQL Server Management with IDERA

INDUSTRY

The South Wales Police Department is responsible for an area of around 812 square miles, home to 1.23 million people, approximately 42 percent of the country’s entire population. The capital city, Cardiff is recognised as one of the fastest growing cities in Europe, while Swansea is a maritime city with a rich and varied history with many prime attractions. The South Wales area attracts about 4 million tourists each year.

CHALLENGE

The challenge for the South Wales Police IT department involved the migration of various legacy applications to one that relies heavily on SQL servers. A Senior Database Administrator, Justin Hostettler-Davies must supervise the monitoring and management of more than 30 SQL servers and provide performance reports as well as troubleshooting problems. The DBA staff needed automated solutions that would free them from having to individually log in to each server for maintenance tasks.

SOLUTION

IDERA’s SQL Diagnostic Manager and SQL Admin Toolset provide automated solutions to improve the management and monitoring of database servers, helping DBAs to proactively manage and troubleshoot their extensive SQL Server environment of the South Wales Police Department—all through a central console.

Supervising within a team of eight DBAs, senior database administrator Justin Hostettler Davies is responsible for managing Microsoft SQL Server databases for widely distributed servers used by the South Wales Police Department in the UK.

“We were having difficulty maintaining all our databases on many different servers effectively and efficiently,” he explained. “Because many procedures were manual and very time consuming, some maintenance tasks weren’t carried out as vigorously as they should have been.”

To help solve the problem, Hostettler-Davies evaluated potential SQL Server database monitoring tools about two years ago – including IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager. The IT group already used other monitoring tools for its Oracle databases and was thinking of extending them to SQL Server databases. However, upon evaluation, “We found the competitor’s tools were quite limited in what they could provide us specifically, whereas IDERA’s tools offered multiple solutions to our problems.”