SQL Server Performance Forum – Threads Archive

time costs

Hi all, We are looking at bringing in SQL 2005 (Standard Ed.) as part of a new accounting package. My boss has charged me with finding out how much time she can expect to spend on maintenance and general SQL related "stuff" once it is up and running. There will be about 200 people accessing it to manage their cost centers. Any ideas? Thanks for your time,
Liz

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I’m not sure that there is any "standard" expectations like that. As maintenance always depends on the application(s), environment, and disaster recovery plans. The best place to start would be by checking with reference sites that the Accounting Package vendor should supply you with. In other words, contact existing customers as they would know first hand how "good" the application is at maintaining its own database. Worst Case Scenario: The database was constructed by a bunch of VB programmers and has no indexes at all, no maintenance plans at all that will be installed with the application, the performance will start poorly and continue to degrade. In that environment someone will be needed full time for a while to get things under control. Best Case Scenario: The database was constructed by a SQL DBA and will be installed with appropriate indexes, and maintenance plans that will self-tune the system. Meaning that indexes will be defragmented/rebuilt on schedules, the transaction logs will be backed up appropriately throughout the day, and they will tell you which files to backup to tape (other disk) on a nightly basis. And you already have someone in place that will just add the backups to your existing data recovery plans. In that scenario you can probably expect that you will only need someone on a very part time basis. My experience has shown me that applications tend to be shipped with poorly designed indexing which allows the application to work in a test environment and then the performance is unmanageable in the "real" world. The vendor will always say "you need a bigger/faster/sharper" server to run our software on which merely masks the real issue, a nice application with a poor database design. For instance, I currently administrate a large medical management system from a very large vendor with a lot of customers. Until I was brought in their answer to why things took 10-20 seconds was always "you need to put SQL Server on a bigger box" our software works great. Within 2 weeks of starting I was able to see thousands of percent improvement in many of the most frequently run queries just by adding the appropriate indexes and removing indexes that were very poorly designed. My (long winded) suggestion — Plan on contracting a DBA or really good performance tuner to monitor and get things setup, expecting that they will need a lot of hours the first month or so of release. Then you’ll need minimal amounts of their time on an ongoing basis depending on whether or not your users will accept the system as is, or will be constantly asking for additional reports etc. Start by contacting other customers who already use the product. As SQL Server 2005 is just about to be released, I’m not sure that will be the best platform unless the vendor has already certified their system to run on it. Otherwise, you’ll end up with issues and they’ll point the finger at your server, and you’ll be scratching your head.

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Liz
If you’re based in UK I can help you out in setup and maintenance of SQL Server. Satya SKJ
Contributing Editor & Forums Moderator
http://www.SQL-Server-Performance.Com
This posting is provided “AS IS” with no rights for the sake of knowledge sharing.

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And if you are in Argentina, me too.
Luis Martin
Moderator
SQL-Server-Performance.com One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important
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I can do London, England or Sao Paulo, Brazil <img src=’/community/emoticons/emotion-5.gif’ alt=’‘ />

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I guess, bottom line is, that you should hire a consultant with experience in SQL Server. I don’t think this is a question for an online community as it is too specific to your environment. —
Frank Kalis
Microsoft SQL Server MVP
http://www.insidesql.de
Heute schon gebloggt?http://www.insidesql.de/blogs
Ich unterstütze PASS Deutschland e.V. http://www.sqlpass.de)

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I would say not much after queries and indexes are tuned and maintenance plan is developed, tested and tuned.

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