In recent headlines, we have heard or seen the news on company mergers in different sectors of the economy. “Cigna and Express Script” in healthcare and “Disney and Fox” in entertainment are just some examples. There have been large and small deals. There is a wide range of drivers for such deals – bringing two different business types together to offer the end user a more complete solution, reducing operating costs, building a greater arsenal of assets to the overall company, etc. Whatever the driver(s), there are some common scenarios that impact IT and database administrators in particular. Updating email servers and addresses to reflect the company name, tagging corporate assets across the new organizations, and consolidating applications are a few common scenarios. Additionally, there will be a need to collect and consolidate servers and particularly database servers for DBAs. DBAs will need to gain awareness and knowledge of databases, their associated server details, and connecting applications, and form a newly updated inventory of the databases and servers.
DBA managers that have gone through consolidation of the DBA groups as part of merging a few companies into one organization would agree that the top two needs are:
- Find all the SQL Servers spread out across the environment, especially if they lack a complete list.
- Associate the application, business groups, and contacts to the right databases and SQL Server instances.
I recently spoke with a DBA Manager that has gone through the DBA groups consolidation, and the new group did not have a complete picture of all SQL Server instances and databases that have now come under their group. They installed and used SQL Inventory Manager to discover all the SQL Server instances and databases in their environment. They were able to pull together a complete list of the SQL Server instances and databases with a robust set of data and added custom fields to maintain other relevant organization details like business groups, contacts, region, etc. SQL Inventory Manager helped them to pull together the information faster than manually piecing old spreadsheets or running scripts to track down the data. SQL Inventory Manager will also maintain and refresh the data, eliminating the need for the DBAs to go out and retrieve the data. One view that is particularly helpful is the Patch List, which shows all the current versions for the SQL Servers and provides information on patches and hotfixes that may be applicable for those servers.
Whether you are undergoing an organizational change or consolidation or just need to discover and maintain an inventory of SQL Servers, check out SQL Inventory Manager to help you build out and manage your SQL Server inventory. Try it yourself for free for 14 days.