Working With A SQL Server Consultant Checklist: Getting Access To SQL Server

Options

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Working with clients long term presents some different options for how I interact with their SQL Servers.

• Working on a web meeting with the team watching
• Having them give me direct access to SQL Server

While everything kicks off with some analysis done all together, different teams have different ways of working with me after that.

It really depends on the point of the engagement.

Facetime

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Some companies have teams of folks that want to:

• Have me look at and work on specific things
• Ask me questions about a bunch of topics
• Learn how I do things so they can analyze and tune on their own

For those clients, we schedule meetings for a block of time, and someone shares their screen so I can take remote control.

It’s less messy, because everyone can see what I’m running, ask questions about the options and output, and I don’t need any credentials.

This way is my favorite, because it’s less for me to keep track of, and more interactive.

Shadowy

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Other companies either don’t have time for all that, or are using me to do things they don’t have staff to do. Competency, or something.

For those folks, there’s usually a few things involved:

• VPNs
• Jump boxes
• Authenticator apps

Only two clients have ever sent me a computer to work on. For everyone else, I set up a VM specific to them to use and work on.

It helps me keep things separated, and it makes getting rid of all the evidence assets when the engagement is done, and after everything has been handed over.

This way is more secure for everyone, but I have had issues with a couple VPN providers not liking connections from a VM, because they detect it as a RDP session.

You can work around that by using Team Viewer or another remote access app, but thankfully those issues are sporadic.

While this isn’t my favorite way to work, it does allow me to work asynchronously. I sometimes keep weird hours, and it’s nice to be able to get things done on my own schedule.

It’s also nice to be able to hand someone a flawlessly tuned query without them having to see all the different things I tried to get there.

Party Of One

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Since I’m a one man party, I can’t really offer on-call or emergency hours.

I also tend to focus exclusively on SQL Server performance issues, and not security, corruption or server-down issues. I respect people who want to deal with those issues, but the liability is too big, and I’d much rather stick to the performance tuning stuff that I’m passionate about.

In tomorrow’s post, I’ll talk about some things you can do to get prepared to work with a consultant to make their jobs easier.

Thanks for reading!

Going Further

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If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll love my training. I’m offering a 75% discount to my blog readers if you click from here. I’m also available for consulting if you just don’t have time for that and need to solve performance problems quickly.