Please briefly describe what CECC does:
The California Educational Computer Consortium (CECC) is a nonprofit organization that develops and supports COMPASSedu, an ERP system used by school districts and county offices of education across California.

Brief description of your SQL Server environment:
We operate a primary data center in San Bernardino, California, with a disaster recovery (DR) site in Victorville, approximately 40 miles away. Our environment supports production, development, and test workloads for CECC members. Our largest SQL Server instance runs on a 128-core server with 4 TB of memory, hosting approximately 160 databases totaling 8 TB of data.

Describe the scope of the work SQL Solutions Group undertook for you.
We were relying on VM snapshots for disaster recovery and wanted to transition to a more robust, real-time high availability solution using SQL Server Always On Availability Groups (AG). We engaged SQL Solutions Group to help design and implement this architecture due to our limited in-house experience with AGs.

What are the outcomes of this work?
We successfully implemented Availability Groups across our environments, starting with development and progressing to production. After validating the solution with our largest member (San Bernardino County), we expanded the deployment to all remaining production SQL Server instances. This resulted in a standardized, highly available architecture across our organization, and minimized the need to have services offline for members during maintenance periods.

How did the project help you be more competitive and/or productive?
After completing the project, we needed to refresh hardware at our primary data center. With the cluster and Availability Groups in place, we were able to migrate to new infrastructure in minutes, rather than requiring a full weekend and significant downtime. This dramatically reduced operational risk and improved service availability.

What kind of ROI did you realize from the work done by SQL Solutions Group?
The ROI has been substantial in both risk reduction and operational efficiency. We’ve minimized downtime, simplified maintenance, and gained the ability to perform infrastructure upgrades with little to no user impact—capabilities that were not possible in our previous environment.

What would you tell a company that was considering using the services of SQL Solutions Group?
SQL Solutions Group is an extremely professional and knowledgeable team. They were patient and thorough throughout the entire process, ensuring we were comfortable with each step before moving forward. By the time we reached production, we had full confidence in the solution.

Their global team made it easy to coordinate after-hours work, which was critical for tasks requiring downtime. They have also been highly responsive when we’ve encountered network-related challenges affecting Availability Groups.

While we don’t often engage consultants, this project was a great investment and money well spent. We would confidently recommend SQL Solutions Group to any organization needing their expertise.

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Please describe in broad terms what your company does. Personal and commercial residential property insurance.

Brief description of your SQL Server environment: SQL Server 2019 Availability Group consisting of two replicas.

Describe the scope of the work SQL Solutions Group undertook for you. Scope of Work SQL Solutions Group (SSG) led a zero-downtime migration of the SQL Server environment by deploying and configuring two new SQL Server 2019 virtual machines, integrating them into the existing Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC), and adding them as secondary replicas in the production Availability Group. This multi-site cluster architecture allowed all migration activities to occur without impacting production workloads. Following the successful cutover, the legacy SQL servers were decommissioned, resulting in a clean two-node WSFC in the new data center.

In addition to the database migration, SSG provided temporary Active Directory administration and migration support during the transition period. Due to the compressed project timeline and limited internal Active Directory resources, SSG assisted with the following activities:

• Validated and coordinated the site-to-site VPN connectivity between the two data centers  
• Configured new domain controllers in the target environment and joined them to the existing domain  
• Transferred Global Catalog responsibilities to the new environment to support the retirement of the legacy domain controllers  
• Served as the acting domain administrator throughout the migration and transition period  

We remained responsible for the migration and deployment of the web, application, and other non-database infrastructure components. SSG’s primary responsibility was the database tier, with additional Active Directory support provided to ensure a successful migration.

Challenges The timeline was extremely compressed from the outset. A migration of this scope typically takes around 90 days from scoping to go-live; with an October 10th kickoff and a hard November 29th go-live, SSG had roughly 50 days to complete this migration. Several factors then tightened that window further.

Separately, a hardware limitation in the existing backup infrastructure created a data-transfer bottleneck that threatened the schedule. SSG caught it early, flagged it to the customer, and re-engineered the transfer approach to stay on track — without ever putting data integrity at risk.

A further complication was political. The source data center was still controlled by the incumbent provider — our managed services partner of several years and the very company our migration was leaving. The cutover required SSG to coordinate across four parties with competing interests: the incumbent provider, which still held the legacy environment; us, its departing client; the new cloud host; and SSG, leading the migration.

The provider being replaced has little incentive to smooth its own exit, and it cost time — VM credentials and backup tapes arrived three weeks after kickoff, erasing what buffer remained.

To its credit, the incumbent referred us to SSG and stayed cooperative throughout, but SSG still had to actively manage all four relationships to keep the project on track.

Why did you choose SQL Solutions Group to address these needs? SQL Solutions Group supported our SQL Server 2019 Availability Group environment, hosted by our incumbent provider, from 2022 to 2025. When we elected to transition away from that provider, we made the strategic decision to move our infrastructure to a new cloud host. SSG was engaged directly to lead the migration effort and provide ongoing fractional DBA support and proactive monitoring.

What are the outcomes of this work? SSG completed the migration on November 29, 2025, one day prior to the hard deadline, without data loss or service disruption.

How did the project help you be more competitive and/or productive? The move to the new cloud host modernized our infrastructure without any operational disruption — but the bigger win was eliminating the risk of a failed or delayed migration. SSG hit the deadline, we lost no data, and our teams never felt the impact. We’re now on a more scalable platform to support our growth.

What kind of ROI did you realize from the work done by SQL Solutions Group? The most direct ROI was avoiding the cost and risk of unplanned downtime during a complex data center migration. SSG’s multi-site cluster approach meant production workloads were never at risk, and completing the project a day ahead of a hard deadline protected us from potential contractual and operational exposure. Ongoing fractional DBA support also means we get enterprise-level SQL Server expertise without the overhead of a full-time hire.

What would you tell a company that was considering using the services of SQL Solutions Group? SQL Solutions Group successfully delivered a complex SQL Server migration with no production downtime. Their team demonstrated strong technical expertise in SQL Server, Always On Availability Groups, and Windows Server Failover Clustering, while also providing valuable Active Directory support during the transition.

What stood out most was their ability to plan and execute the migration methodically, communicate clearly throughout the project, and adapt to challenges as they arose. They worked collaboratively with our internal team and other stakeholders to ensure a smooth cutover and successful deployment.

For organizations considering SQL Solutions Group, we would recommend them for SQL Server migrations, high-availability implementations, disaster recovery projects, and related infrastructure transitions. Their experience and attention to detail helped reduce risk and allowed us to complete a critical migration within a compressed timeline while maintaining service availability.

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Brief description of CSM’s SQL Server environment:
We have a Fail Over Cluster.

Why did CSM choose SQL Solutions Group for its database needs?
Randy and his team were recommended to me by Brent Ozar. After speaking with Randy, it was clear that they could help us.  

Describe the scope of the work SQL Solutions Group undertook for CSM.
It started with a full stack health check and remediation of incorrect configurations. SSG then moved on to tackling improvements:

• Query tuning 
• Machine allocation recommendations 
• Designing SQL VM specs for a cloud migration
• Executing the cloud migration 
• Migrate/Upgrade from SQL 2012 to SQL 2022 
• Improve data loss times with a better backup system

What are the outcomes of this work?
Greater stability and speed of the application.

How did the project help CSM be more competitive and/or productive?
We were able to spend less time worrying and managing our SQL systems and more time focusing on our product. That’s a significant improvement.  

What kind of ROI did you realize from the work done by SQL Solutions Group?
As reported by our support staff, we just had our most stable busy season ever, which is absolutely the goal.

What would you tell a company that was considering using the services of SQL Solutions Group?
Randy and the crew are great to work with and I would highly recommend them. We have nothing but great things and good experiences to share. 

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Brief description of Andersen Shelling’s SQL Server environment:
We have multiple SQL Server instances running on virtual machines. The important ones being our production software Parity Factory, and Sage 100 for accounting.

Why did Andersen Shelling choose SQL Solutions Group for its database needs?
Randy’s credentials were top notch. His familiarity with both the setup of the virtual machines as well as in-depth knowledge of SQL Server.

Describe the scope of the work SQL Solutions Group undertook for Andersen Shelling.
Review and reconfiguration of virtual machines running SQL Server. Review of SQL Server performance of Parity Factory. Ongoing monitoring of critical SQL Servers.

What are the outcomes of this work?
There were a lot of changes to the virtual hardware of the Parity Factory virtual machine. This led to an increase in performance with an actual decrease in allocated resources. Their observations of the Parity Factory SQL performance allowed me to counter claims from that company about the cause of Parity having poor performance.

The ongoing monitoring continues to give me hard data to refute their claims that poor performance is virtual machine or host related.

How did the project help Andersen Shelling be more competitive and/or productive?
They allowed us to correct the setup on our virtual machines and be confident they did not need any tinkering. This freed up I.T. resources to work on other issues. The ongoing monitoring also takes some of that burden off the I.T. staff.

What would you tell a company that was considering using the services of SQL Solutions Group?
SQL Server is EVERYWHERE. Some are big and obvious while others are not. Very few organizations have a dedicated database resource and certainly not of the caliber of SSG’s staff. The installation of SQL Server is complicated and mostly done in the background as part of the installation of the front-end application. This is further complicated when done in the virtual environment.

There is real value in having someone who lives and breathes SQL Server at the highest level like SSG to review your running instances and make recommendations. You will get more reliable and less resource-hungry installs. If you don’t have your own SQL expert, you are at the mercy of the software provider’s word when things aren’t running well. Having SSG in your corner will keep them honest. You could say we’re nuts about SSG!

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Introduce your business and what you do there.
I’m the CEO of a cloud-based practice management software.

What challenge were you trying to address with SQL Solutions Group?
We needed help improving the speed of our software.

What was the scope of the project?
SQL Solutions Group is helping us optimize our software’s speed. First, they conducted a health check for our SQL server. After that, they had a full presentation detailing areas for improvement. They’ve then made a plan where easier fixes are prioritized over more complicated ones. SQL Solutions Group has installed a tool on our server that tells us a query’s speed. Their team advises us on what improvements we can make to increase our system’s performance.

How did you come to work with SSG?
We found them through a Google search for SQL server consulting providers.

What is the status of this engagement?
We’ve started working together in January 2021, and it’s ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
We’ve gotten more than our money’s worth with SQL Solutions Group.

How did SSG perform from a project management standpoint?
SQL Solutions Group is always available whenever we need them. We communicate through Zoom calls.

What did you find most impressive about this engagement?
SQL Solutions Group’s high level of expertise with SQL is impressive. SQL is a complicated product to work with, and their more than 25 years of experience in SQL is what we need for our business.

Are there any areas where SSG could improve?
I can’t think of anything. We’ve been pleased with their services.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?
The larger your application and database, the more necessary SQL Solutions Group’s services are. Work with them if you want to scale your business and grow your software company.

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The case study below was submitted by Keith Putt, Director of IT at Verathon

Brief description of Verathon and SQL Server usage environment:
Verathon is a global leader in medical devices, primarily bladder volume measurement and airway management, in over 60 countries and regions. Our database environment currently includes both on-premise and Azure based databases that support enterprise apps, ERP, and websites.

Our requirements for SQL Server include high availability, off-site disaster recovery, and high-performance reporting.

Why did Verathon choose SQL Solutions Group for its database needs?
We needed an on-shore team with the right expertise in this space — a breadth of skillsets to support SQL and underlying reporting concepts to help us leverage datasets. We also needed a flexible model that provided on-going oversight and health checks of systems that allowed us to scale up on a monthly basis, depending on business need. SQL Solutions Group matched all these needs.

Describe the scope of the work SQL Solutions Group undertook for Verathon.
We sought out SSG because of an integration project, between SalesForce and our Epicor ERP system. The SSG team had good experience with Task Factory, which is what we selected for our integration. It allows us to maintain our APIs using a SQL resource rather than a one-off developer.

We started off with an inventory and Health Check of our environments, looking for configuration and performance issues. We also needed assistance migrating our disaster recovery strategy from co-location to the cloud. SSG also installed SentryOne for ongoing monitoring of performance and health of our production systems.

What were the outcomes of this work?
Since SQL Solutions Group started, we can more proactively respond to bottlenecks or other changes and challenges that impact requirements, performance and scale. SentryOne provides excellent visibility into long-running queries or other areas where we can improve enterprise applications. With SSG, we have a consistent resource that has knowledge and understanding of our environment, so if issues arise, they can quickly address them—they already know our systems.

How did the project help Verathon be more competitive and/or productive?
We have reassurance of the underlying health and performance of our enterprise systems and databases. With SSG handling what they do best, our full-time staff can focus on their areas of expertise, rather than forcing them to dabble as a SQL developer or administrator. Working with SSG gives us that expertise without having a “DBA” on staff. Another benefit is that they’ve helped us more effectively manage SQL Server licensing needs and hardware requirements in the enterprise. We’ve been able to consolidate so we don’t have “SQL sprawl.”

What would you tell a company that was considering using the services of SQL Solutions Group?
If you’re looking for a company with SQL and reporting expertise, that is onshore, easy to work with, has good communication and solid follow through, then SQL Solutions Group would be a great choice.

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The case study below was submitted by Russell Millwee, Manager of Network Services at Tuesday Morning

Brief description of Tuesday Morning and SQL Server usage environment:
Tuesday Morning began in 1974 as a purveyor of excess inventory across numerous categories. We are headquartered in Dallas, where we began, and we have some 500 stores across most of the U.S. Microsoft SQL Server is our primary database environment for all backend tools. These are primarily our point-of-sale system, data warehouse, and all merchandising and business intelligence systems. We also have an in-house integration tool that relies on SQL Server.

Why did Tuesday Morning choose SQL Solutions Group for its database needs?
We knew about Randy and SSG from a former DBA who had worked with Randy at Match.com. After a different DBA left for another opportunity, we were a bit lost without that SQL expertise. We contacted Randy and liked the level of expertise he and SSG brought to the table. We’ve been leaning on them pretty heavily for help with what we can’t handle ourselves.

Describe the scope of the work SQL Solutions Group undertook for Tuesday Morning.
SQL Solutions Group supports our Tier 1 systems—merchandising, point-of-sale, data warehousing, business intelligence, and the integration server.

We’re running everything on VMWare, and most of the work has focused on optimizing volumes, like allocating paravirtual SCSI adapters, formatting volumes with 64k block size, etc. There’s also index maintenance, work on back-ups and restores, DB integrity checks, and installation of SentryOne SQL Sentry for monitoring and alerting.

SSG has also worked with our compliance team on reporting from our HR system. For example, every day we get a matrix report generated by SQL Server that includes all new hires and terminations. This dictates work for adding new users and their permissions, or deactivating users in the system. And there’s also the day-to-day care of the systems, or addressing issues at come up, even in the middle of the night or on weekends. SSG is great at getting to the root of the problem.

Recently, SSG helped us set up a new database availability group to help us handle RF scanner traffic for price markdowns in stores. That’s a lot of read data coming in from stores every night. Randy helped us build this DAG to help with all the reads, so we’ll be rolling this out across the chain in the coming months.

What were the outcomes of this work?
We see great improvements in performance across the board. We used to have a lot of trouble with our overnight batch process that would start at midnight and run to 6 a.m., and now it’s running much better with fewer interruptions. There are far fewer calls in the middle of the night to address issues. We used to have to reboot our point-of-sale application issue every Friday, but after SSG did their work, this problem has virtually gone away. With SQL Sentry, we have much better monitoring, alerting, and visibility into what is going on. We know when jobs are going too long, or when backups fail, and that’s something auditors like to see.

How did the project help Tuesday Morning be more competitive and/or productive?
The application supporting price markdowns is a big deal for us, because in the past, we had to do it in bulk, for everything. With the hand-held scanners in the store, the team member can scan certain products and do the markdown right then on one or two products instead of an across-the-board markdown. That kind of agility means laser-focused pricing strategy on certain products or product categories. That’s an advantage.

SSG will also be helpful with SQL Server licensing, helping us know what we need, what we can get rid of, and where we can be more efficient. There’s potentially noticeable ROI from that because SQL Server licensing makes a big impact on the bottom line.

What would you tell a company that was considering using the services of SQL Solutions Group?
SSG offers unparalleled SQL expertise and knowledge. They’re really the cream of the crop.

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The case study below was submitted by Bryan Evans, Application Development Manager at Orbit Irrigation

Brief description of Orbit and SQL Server usage environment: Orbit is the world leader in manufacturing and supplying irrigation, misting, and home improvement products to homeowners in forty countries across five continents. We use SQL for business-critical applications and reporting.

Why did Orbit choose SQL Solutions Group for its database needs?
SSG came highly recommended from the organizer of SQL Saturday. We were facing a significant performance issue within our point-of-sale database and needed outside help to resolve the issue.

Describe the scope of the work SQL Solutions Group undertook for Orbit.
SSG came in and did a health check and overall system review with us. We found there were many underlying problems in our SQL environment, causing significant performance issues.  SSG helped us map out a course of action and we started to see improvements immediately.

Our SQL environment became stable and we gained significant performance on reports and forms.

How did the project help Orbit be more competitive and/or productive?
We don’t have a fulltime DBA on staff, so it is difficult for us to maintain our SQL environment.  Having SSG working for us freed up valuable time for my developers to focus on what they excelled at, rather than trying to manage and upgrade SQL.

What kind of ROI did you realize from the work done by SQL Solutions Group?
Our ROI is found in uptime. We were able to keep our SQL environment up and running with little down time.

What would you tell a company that was considering using the services of SQL Solutions Group?
SSG has been great to work with. They continue to help us with disk performance and corruption issues that would have taken us down for days. I feel 100% confident when working with SSG that they will resolve any issue we face.

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The case study below was submitted by Alexandr Anaya, IT Director at Northwestern Management 

Description of Northwestern Management (NWM) and SQL Server usage environment:
We are a Dental Service Organization with 33 dental practices in South/Central Florida plus a corporate office.  We use SQL Server as the backbone of our Practice Management System.

Why did NWM choose SQL Solutions Group for its database needs?
We were looking for a company with a deep level of expertise, as our DB was corrupted and we needed to address it right away. We also had serious performance issues, and nobody could detect the root cause of it. The loss of revenue we had before was more than you can measure; we were losing patients because of the system without even knowing it!

Our software provider recommended SQL Solutions Group.

Describe the scope of the work SSG undertook for NWM:
With SSG, we fixed the corruption, and from there we did a complete assessment and a dramatic tune up. This was followed by a migration to SQL 2012 and to the latest version of our application. SSG is also monitoring our database. Right now, we are building our Report Portal with SSRS, replacing all the Excel spreadsheets we are still using (hundreds of them).

What were the outcomes of this work?
We used to have SQL crashes and slowdowns quite a few times every month (sometimes every day) affecting all our users and patients. With all that SSG did, the application is very stable. In fact, we haven’t had any other issues with performance, which translates into revenue, and of course improves the company’s image.

We continue to work with SSG because they have proven they have the expertise and commitment. With SSG’s help, my team and I can focus on projects instead of trying to keep the database running.

What would you tell a company that was considering using the services of SSG?
Randy and his team are the best around! Without a doubt, partnering with SSG is one of the best decisions we’ve made.

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Description of BROWZ and SQL Server usage environment:
BROWZ is a third-party compliance SAAS company. We use SQL Server as our backend database and also use SQL Reporting Services as our reporting engine.

Why did BROWZ choose SQL Solutions Group for its database needs?
It was really a combination of location, expertise and personal touch. We wanted someone who “got” what BROWZ was about and was willing to work with us in a flexible fashion. We weren’t looking for just a monitoring solution but someone who were SQL experts and we felt Randy and team were a good fit.

Describe the scope of the work SQL Solutions Group undertook for BROWZ.
SSG really has turned into our remote DBAs. We use them for everything from architectural guidance, to performance tuning, to day-to-day M&S support for more complex issues. Most recently we engaged SSG to help us migrate from SQL 2008 to SQL 2012 with encryption.

What were the outcomes of this work?
The project has gone well and they have been around for every step of the trip. They knew our environment from a SQL standpoint, probably better than we did. SSG helped provide guidance on the overall approach including hardware specifications, network configurations, and migration strategy. The BROWZ team is pretty strong—but it was great having some outside expertise to confirm direction and also provide some additional expertise. We did all the environments as part of the upgrade and actually just completed the production migration this past week.

What else has SQL Solutions Group helped with?
We have engaged SSG to help with a few performance issues that were complex in nature. By engaging the team, it allowed the BROWZ team to focus on the core application components, while letting SSG really focus on the backend performance. SSG’s ability to help tune the system has really led to a significant improvement on the overall performance.

How has SSG help BROWZ be more competitive and productive?
It allowed us to focus on our core competencies, while giving expertise in all areas. We probably don’t have the need for a full-time DBA,  so this provides the best of both worlds.

What kind of ROI did you realize from the work done by SQL Solutions Group?
More than an ROI—it really allows me a more flexible budget without sacrificing quality. This allows me to look at work as being more project based, while still allowing BROWZ to have DBA expertise when called upon.

What would you tell a company that was considering using the services of SQL Solutions Group?
Smart move! At the end of the day what I like best about SSG and Randy is that I know they have the expertise but they are also dependable business partners. I trust their input, but also know that if something goes wrong,  they will be there to help us figure out the issue and get it resolved. We haven’t seen anyone else provide the level of consistent expertise SSG does.

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