Timo Lindström, CEO, DB Pro Oy & DB Pro Services Oy.
Your dashboard looks green. The alerts are silent. Yet your costs keep rising year after year. This is perhaps the most common misconception about database environments: that performance and cost-effectiveness are one and the same.
They are not.
The metrics are addressing the wrong question
Performance metrics, such as CPU utilization percentage, IOPS, memory utilization, and query response time, among others, are essential. They tell you whether your environment is currently functioning as it should. This is important information.
But they don’t tell you how many processor cores are actually in productive use compared to what you’re paying for in your license. Why is the server next to it licensed identically but has a completely different load profile? Could the same performance be achieved with 30% less capacity?
“CPU at 30% means one thing: you’re paying for 70% of capacity that does nothing for you.”
These are economic issues, not technical ones. And traditional performance metrics don’t address them.
Two different problems, two different tools
There are excellent solutions on the market for performance monitoring. They help DBAs identify slow queries, deadlocks, and bottlenecks. They are an essential part of managing a database environment.
But they are designed to answer the question: What is wrong right now? Capacity optimization answers a different question: Was the environment set up correctly in the first place?
These are not competing with each other. They solve different problems.
What does that look like in practice?
The performance dashboard shows: everything is green, response times are acceptable, and there are no alerts. IT reports to management: “The environment is running smoothly.”
The capacity analysis shows that 35% of the cores are in productive use more than 20% of the time. The rest are idle, waiting for workloads that never arrive or arrive so infrequently that they could be handled with less capacity.
The dashboard doesn’t show this. It isn’t designed to show this.
Our experience shows that by optimizing capacity, we can reduce the costs of SQL Server environments by 30–50%.
Who is responsible for this question?
No one. That’s the problem.
The DBA focuses on performance. The CIO focuses on availability. The CFO focuses on the bottom line. None of them look at the relationship between capacity and cost, because none of them have the right tools or data to do so.
98% of our more than 200 optimization projects have yielded significant savings. Prior to the analysis, the performance metrics for all of them showed acceptable readings.
→ Request a free capacity assessment: www.sqlgovernor.com
Best regards, Timo Lindström
CEO, DB Pro Oy & DB Pro Services Oy
Are you interested? I’d be happy to talk with you.