SQL Server Consulting - San Diego

SQL Server

Microsoft SQL Server is a much more powerful database than Microsoft Access. While Access may be fine for offices with a small number of users, as the number of users or the amount of data in your company continues to grow, the performance of your Access-based application may eventually no longer be able to keep up with that growth. Migrating your data to SQL Server may be the solution for you.

Unlike Access, SQL Server is a true "client/server" database. What this means is that the majority of the work in processing data is actually done on the server, rather than on the user's workstation. For example, if a user runs a query that searches through thousands of rows of data to find the few rows that belong to customer "ABC Company", desktop databases such as Microsoft Access must retrieve those thousands of rows from the shared database on your file server and bring them over your network down to the user's workstation. The user's workstation then does the work of querying those rows to locate the few desired rows. But with a client/server database, such as SQL Server, the querying takes place on the server machine, not the user's workstation. Only the few desired rows (the few belonging to customer "ABC Company", for example) are retrieved over the network and brought down to the user's workstation. Network traffic is thereby minimized, resulting in better performance. In addition, performance can be greatly enhanced by adding more "horsepower" to the server machine in the way of disk space, memory, processor speed, number of processors, etc., since this is the machine where the majority of processing now occurs.

If you already have a SQL Server database, there's a lot that a consultant can do to increase the performance of your database for your particular needs. By taking a look at the type of queries commonly being run in your company, a consultant can often "tune" the database to be more responsive to these queries. This can be done by adding additional indexes that can speed the execution of the queries commonly being run. Or, it may be that making more use of stored procedures or improving the efficiency of existing stored procedures could boost your performance.

Reporting Database / Datamart / Data Warehouse

Your database may be running efficiently enough, but can your users locate the data they need to furnish management with good decision support? When users try to run reports on your data, do the reports take a long time to run? A database that is well-designed for data entry purposes (OLTP - Online Transaction Processing) may not be well suited for reporting purposes (OLAP - Online Analytical Processing). You may benefit by having a reporting database (a Datamart or Data Warehouse) designed for your specific reporting requirements. Such a database can be automatically refreshed weekly, nightly, hourly, etc., according to the particular need.

(Microsoft SQL Server comes with DTS - Data Transformation Services, a tool that facilitates the gathering of data from various sources into a common database for reporting purposes. DTS can handle any needed conversion or "transformation" of the data. SQL Server also manages the scheduling of DTS packages to automatically refresh data at regular predetermined intervals.)