Case Studies

Following a Microsoft licensing audit, our client was facing a 1M euros bill. They decided to reduce the costs by 5 by consolidating and migrating to SQL 2016 SP1. Different phases composed this project, such as Inventory, Planning, Trace collection, Auditing, Bench-marking, Migration assistant, Migration, Performance Analysis, Optimisations, Follow up. At the end of the project, our client had much less servers to administer, SQL instances configured according to Microsoft best practices, better performance, and had saved hundreds of thousands of euros.

REQUEST A CALL BACK

Our client had SQL Server, SSIS, SSRS, SSAS, MDS, all sitting together. The OLTP databases were cohabiting with the BI databases. All this led to security issues as well as some huge performance issues. Besides their datawarehouse was more a copy of certain tables but not a real datawarehouse designed to build cubes on top. We designed and put in place a new architecture to separate the roles, taking into account the budget restrictions. Once the new architecture was approved, we planned the migration and implemented it. The new topology now delivers much better performance. This also brought new business perspectives thanks to a real BI analysis.

One of the world leaders in Retail had some massive performance issues. We optimised their queries and helped them reach some decent performance, customer satisfaction improving from “Very Frustrated” to “Very Satisfied”. Some of the queries went from 15hours to 3s.

Our client had all sorts of issues on their critical SQL Server, from connection timeouts to maintenance job failing, to important error messages such as a corrupted database in the error logs, etc. We delivered a SQL Health and Risk Audit which reported over 60 issues. They also asked us to help implement some of the recommendations. Their critical server is much more stable and they hardly have any issues to the point they decided to get rid of their DBA.

Our banking and finance client had BizTalk server 2013 R2 on a SQL Server 2012 backend.
They had a poorly designed architecture handling heavy nightly B2B trandsaction data feeds but constantly throttling and causing critical delays due to performance issues.
We provided a tight budget approach to correcting the architectural deficiencies with minimal impact by introducing an EAI structure in a phased approach and thus removing existing cyclic dependencies. This allowed us to monitor system-wide impact both on the back end and front end much more correctly using our specialised SQL server monitoring tools as well the BizTalk BHM tool with careful performance monitors.
We were also able to fine tune the SQL layer and optimise disk I/O to deliver a fully performant solution without the need to completely decommission and upgrade the existing system at full cost.