Santiago Arias

18 April 2017

Dude, where’s my database? Inventory management by Foundry

Foundry is Redgate’s research and development division. We develop products and technologies for the Microsoft data platform. Each project progresses through Foundry’s four-stage product development process: research, concept, prototype and beta. At each stage, the Foundry team is exploring the scope and potential for Redgate to develop a product. We’ve just started researching inventory management and we’re planning to talk to multiple customers to help us understand this area.

Why inventory management?

We believe there’s pain in monitoring, managing and auditing of SQL Servers, especially at a large scale.

At any point in time, users want to know which databases they own so they can manage their licenses, versions, security patches and more. They also need to be notified when new servers appear on the network, or if servers go down.

Dude, where’s my database?

• What servers and databases do I have?
• Who owns them?
• Can I auto discover newly created servers on the network?

Lightweight monitoring

You don’t always need (or can afford) flagship monitoring for all your servers. Maybe they’re non-production instances, or maybe they aren’t mission-critical, but you still want to know first if something isn’t quite right. We think there’s an opportunity for lightweight healthchecks of servers and databases, to give the answers to:

• Is the server running? Is there enough disk space?
• Are security patches up to date?
• Have backups run successfully?

License management

For Microsoft licensing it’s important to be able to get an up-to-date list of all SQL Servers with all the information needed to work out the licensing requirements. In general these requirements are:

• SQL Server version
• SQL Server edition
• Number of CPUs
• Whether it’s on a virtual machine

Help us

We’re predominantly interested in SQL Server, but we’d also be interested in talking to people who work in this capacity across hybrid platforms.

If you or anyone you know fits that description, please join the discussion or send us an email.