ShipStation, Austin, Texas

ShipStation is the leading web-based order management and shipping software solution. We were initially brought in to perform one of our SQL Server health checks. We then grew our relationship from there to doing stress tests and workload replays to ensure they had minimal impact as their customer base grew. We became part of their remote DBA team and helped them build their first Availability Groups while performing performance tuning to prepare for Cyber Week. We are proud that an industry-leading company like ShipStation chose us to help them meet their challenges.

US Department of Agriculture

For years, the US Department of Agriculture used a SQL Server based application to handle contract management for their Agricultural Research Service. Recently they expanded its use to many other offices. When the number of users jumped from a few dozen to several hundred, performance quickly deteriorated. Realizing that the issues were more complex than could be addressed by standard database tuning techniques, agency IT management decided that they needed outside expertise.

The budget for the project was small. Our first task was to identify specific optimizations that would result in the greatest performance benefits at the least cost. Our second was to leverage the expertise in their own IT group to aid in the project.

The results pleased everyone. Users were pleased because, in some critical areas, we were able to reduce application response times from minutes to seconds. In general, application performance was improved dramatically across the board. Managers were pleased because user productivity was improved to a corresponding degree and because all of this was accomplished within tight budget constraints.

Hilton Grand Vacations, Orlando, FL

Hilton Grand Vacations is the vacation time-share division of Hilton Hotels Corporation. Their development team did such an outstanding job developing the SQL Server application used to run the time-share business that the hospitality industry giant decided to expand the application’s use to other divisions and to many, many more users.

Wisely, Hilton management decided to seek the advice of SQL Server performance experts regarding the scalability issues they might encounter and to optimize application performance before opening up access to many more users than the application was originally designed to support. SQL Consulting was called in and identified many potential problems in hardware, application code, indexing and server configuration. We resolved many of the issues and provided assistance to Hilton’s development team in resolving others.

Panda Restaurant Group, Inc., Los Angeles, CA

Panda Restaurant Group, the parent company of Panda Express and Hibachi-San Grill has almost 1000 locations covering 34 states and Puerto Rico. When they recently deployed a new SQL Server-based point of sale system to connect remote locations to corporate headquarters, they called on SQL Consulting to help optimize performance in their high volume system.

Civil Air Patrol, Maxwell AFB, AL

The Civil Air Patrol is the volunteer auxiliary of the United States Air Force, headquartered at Maxwell AFB. Their mission is to patrol the coastline of the United States for the interdiction of drug traffic and terrorist activity. They asked us to help them with a complex migration and upgrade of several SQL Servers simultaneously.

State of Washington

SQL Consulting was contacted by the Washington state Department of Corrections to help improve the performance of a third party application used for scheduling. We worked with both department staff and technical representatives from the software vendor. In two days, the application was functioning an order of magnitude faster than before. We also trained both the vendor and department staff to continue the improvement process.

Our success on this first project led to a second contract, this time with the Department of Licensing. We were asked to help optimize the data load procedure for a data warehouse system that was in an early stage of development.

US Auto Parts, Los Angeles, CA

U.S. Auto Parts Network, Inc. is the nation’s leading Internet direct marketer of automotive aftermarket collision replacement parts and accessories. Receiving more than twelve million Web site visitors annually, U.S. Auto Parts carries over 26,000 part numbers, representing over 75,000 unique products in their inventory.

SQL Consulting was originally called in to solve performance problems in their e-commerce and warehouse management systems caused by their rapid increase in business volume. In a short time, we had the database systems performing well again. The management team then asked us to help them address longer term issues. These included data security, future scalability and high availability.

Bowflex (Nautilus Group), Vancouver, WA

With such labels as Bowflex, Nautilus, Stairmaster, Schwinn Exercise Systems, the Nautilus Group is number one in the manufacture and sale of home exercise equipment. At the time of our engagement, Nautilus Group was the fastest-growing company on the NY Stock Exchange and their IT systems were feeling the strain of phenomenal growth.

It took the combined efforts of several consulting groups to totally redesign and rebuild the applications and databases to enable Nautilus Group to continue their phenomenal growth. We were happy to play our SQL Server part in this challenging project alongside of consulting giant Ernst and Young.

Yellow Cab, Phoenix, AZ

Faced with a big growth in business, Yellow Cab of Phoenix wanted to insure that their database systems would scale to meet projected business levels. They called SQL Consulting to work with their own IT department to insure the scalability of their systems and to fix some existing performance issues.