Every Scooby-Doo episode has one thing in common — there’s always a fake ghost.
Sometimes, that “ghost” is really just a guy in a mask trying to scare everyone with smoke machines and spooky sounds. In the SQL Server world, this ghost appears as the canned-query consultant.
You’ve seen them. They roll in with a big name and an even bigger slide deck. They click “Run All,” hand you a 200-page report filled with screenshots and DMV outputs, and vanish into the night. They didn’t solve your mystery; they just dumped a list of clues in your lap. Or worse, you hired a big-name consulting firm, which brought on a team of ten junior consultants, after their architect spouted his expertise in the sales meetings.
At Denny Cherry & Associates Consulting (DCAC), we often get called in after one of these “ghost hunters” has already been through — and nine times out of ten, the real villain is still on the loose.
The Trap of the “Canned Consultant”
These consultants use the same scripts and tools for every customer, no matter the problem. Sure, they’ll tell you your waits are high, your I/O is spiking, and your queries are slow. But they never ask why.
It’s like if Velma said, “There’s dust on the floor,” and left the room. Okay… but is it from footprints, or from the ghost falling through the ceiling? Context matters.
A truly good consultant doesn’t hand you a report — they hand you a story about your environment:
- Why things are happening,
- How different systems interact,
- Where the bottlenecks and hidden villains are lurking, and
- What you can do to fix them and keep them from coming back.
The Trap Behind the Canned Approach
You see, the reason those “canned” consulting outfits love their prepackaged approach is simple — it’s repeatable.
They can send in a whole crew of rookie ghost hunters, run the same flashy set of “ghost-detecting” scripts, and bill it as if they had just saved the day.
But here’s the twist — they’re only chasing the noisy ghosts.
They spot the obvious stuff — missing indexes, high CPU, slow queries — but never dig deep enough to unmask the real villain behind it all.
Worse, those scripts don’t look at your environment as a whole.
They ignore the haunted hallways that connect everything — hardware, security, networking, storage, even the cloud layer. All the things that don’t show up in their limited SQL scans.
It’s like shining a flashlight in one room of the mansion and saying, “Yup, mystery solved!” while the monster is still creeping around in the basement.
The Real Mystery Solvers
At DCAC, we don’t just run canned queries — we follow the trail.
We examine your system architecture, workload patterns, code design, query behavior, indexing strategy, and even your cloud cost structure. Each piece is a clue.
Maybe your blocking isn’t about bad indexes — maybe it’s about poorly designed retry logic. Perhaps your high I/O is coming from a single, rogue report that runs every five minutes due to a job that someone forgot existed. Maybe you scaled your disks for more IOPs, but no one knew to increase the size of the VM to take advantage of those IOPs. Maybe there are villains hiding in your application code or your middle tier.
We don’t stop until the mask comes off and the villain is caught.
As Velma would say, “It’s never just the ghost you think it is.”
Why It Matters
When consultants rely on one-size-fits-all reports, you get recommendations that look like they came from a template — because they did.
But when you work with experts who dive into your specific environment, you get answers that matter.
So next time a consultant promises to solve your problems with a “proprietary diagnostic report,” ask them one question:
“Will you help me understand the clues, or just hand me a list of them?”
Because at DCAC, we don’t just find the villain — we make sure it doesn’t come back for a sequel. By examining your problems holistically with a technical and business mindset, we help you get the results you are looking for, whether it’s reducing your cloud bill, making your application go faster, or handling holiday sales volumes.
The Moral of the Mystery
I know this might sound a little sales pitchy — but here’s the reality: time after time, we hear the same story.
“We hired a big-name consultant, they ran their scripts, gave us a report… and we’re still having the same problems.”
That’s usually when the call comes in: “Can you please help us?”
At DCAC, that’s what we do best. We don’t just drop off the clues — we help you connect them, solve the mystery, and keep the villain from returning.
Because in every haunted SQL Server story, there’s always one truth: the right team can make even the scariest problems disappear.
The post Scooby Dooing Episode 10: The Case of the Copy-and-Paste Consultant first appeared on A Shot of SQLEspresso.