Lemington Consulting

As Microsoft Certified SQL Server experts with decades of experience implementing SQL Server solutions for clients across the United States and internationally, Lemington provides a wide variety of SQL Server consulting services for its clients. Our certified SQL Server professionals can provide database administration (DBA) services who businesses and organizations lacking the internal expertise to manage complex database environments and database servers. Outsourcing database administration duties to a firm like Lemington Consulting is frequently done, whether the database is hosted by the client, or alternatively, the database is hosted at Lemington Consulting, in Microsoft Azure, or another cloud database provider.

Lemington Consulting also provides database integration services through SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) to many types of data sources including on premise data stores, cloud data stores, or data provided by REST API interfaces from third-party data providers. Lemington has the expertise to bring together data from many disparate data sources into a comprehensive data warehouse which can be access seamlessly through Power BI, SharePoint, or other KPI dashboards.

Lemington Consulting has been working with SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) since its inception, as well as SQL Server business intelligence features including Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, and other reporting and business intelligence tools. Lemington can develop, design, and implement SSRS reporting solutions and business intelligence dashboards to provide organizations with the key metrics needs to efficiently and productively manage their operations seamlessly.

Lemington Consulting provides many other SQL Server consulting services including database performance tuning, migrations of data from other data sources to SQL Server, and upgrades of older SQL Server software to newer versions of SQL Server. In addition, with certified Microsoft software developers on staff, Lemington Consulting can assist with database application built on top of SQL Server database including rearchitecting existing SQL Server databases to improve performance and reduce bottlenecks.

Yes, Lemington Consulting is a long-time Microsoft Partner, Microsoft reseller, and Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) and has been reselling Microsoft licenses for more than 20 years. Currently, Microsoft only offers Standard and Enterprise versions of SQL Server 2025. SQL Server Web Edition was deprecated starting with SQL Server 2025 and is no longer offered for resale. SQL Server Standard Edition can be licensed either on a per-core basis (4 core minimum) or on a server plus client access license (CAL) basis. Traditionally, the Server + CAL licensing model is less expensive for roughly 30 users or less, and the per-core licensing is less expensive for user counts above 30 or so users. SQL Server Enterprise Edition is licensed only on a per-core basis with no Server + CAL licensing option available.

Of course, as has been tradition for many years now, SQL Server licenses can be purchased with Software Assurance, an additional set of benefits beyond the actual licenses themselves. Software Assurance must be acquired at the time of purchase of the SQL Server licenses and cannot be purchased later. While the list of Software Assurance benefits for SQL Server are many (please contact us for details), some of the benefits include the Azure Hybrid benefit that allows the SQL Server licenses to be used in Microsoft Azure, new version rights to newer versions of SQL Server when released in the future at no additional cost, and fail-over server rights for disaster recover either on premise or in Microsoft Azure.

SQL Server can also be licensed on a subscription basis (i.e. not perpetual) for 1 or 3 year terms. SQL Server subscription licenses include similar benefits to SQL Server perpetual licenses with Software Assurance. These SQL Server subscription licenses are similar to Microsoft 365 Business and Enterprise licenses and can be purchased from Lemington as a designated Cloud Solution Provider (CSP).

SQL Server offers many advantages over other types of databases. Some of those advantages include the following:

• Security: SQL Server provides two security models including integration with Windows Authentication to provide robust security platform for managing your organizations information. Security can be managed across all database objects including tables, views, stored procedures and at a very granular level, to provide complete information security. Database encryption is now available as well to secure SQL Server database at rest.
• Scalability: SQL Server is a highly scalable enterprise database platform capabable of managing petabytes of data while delivery high performance. This allows organizations to deploy SQL Server databases with the confidence that SQL Server can continue to deliver superior performance even as their needs and businesses grow.
• High Availability/Failover: SQL Server provides a variety of high availablity features including fail over clustering availale on the Standard and Enterprise editions, database mirroring, log shipping, and database snapshots to meet your organizations' needs.
• Business Intelligence: SQL Server Standard and Enterprise Editions come with extensive business intelligence capabilities through SQL Server Analysis Services. Analytical models can be developed to breakdown business information to provide business insights for managing and forecasting business needs. SQL Server also comes with integrated reporting capabilities from SQL Server Reporting Services which allows organizations to access business critical information across the organization. In more recent versions of SQL Server, PowerPivot for Microsoft Excel has been added to allow users another familiar tool for analyzing business data.
• Integration: SQL Server provides a robust set of integration tools call SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) which can be used considate data from multiple heterogenous data sources for holistic data view and comprehensive data analysis. SSIS can also be used to migrate data from other database formats (Oracle, DBase, Paradox, legacy formats, Microsoft Access) to SQL Server.

Windows applications using the Microsoft .NET Framework, Visual Basic (VB) 6.0 applications, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) applications including Microsoft Access and Microsoft Excel, web applications (ASP.NET), and web services (.NET web services). SQL Server is also the database backend for many existing software applications including SharePoint Server, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft Project Server, etc., and these applications can integrated with other SQL Server applications. Existing SQL Server applications can also be enhanced to add new functionality, and migrated to newer versions of SQL Server to take advantages of new features.

You have a number of options for hosting SQL Server databases in the cloud. Lemington Consulting provides its own custom SQL Server hosting services for applications built around SQL Server. Because Lemington Consulting can uniquely and granularly control its own SQL Server hosting environment, this gives our customers more flexibility in customizing their SQL Server hosting experience. This is a significant benefit over other SQL Server hosting services where the hosting environment is highly constrained, limiting what customers can do with the SQL Server hosting environment.

In addition, Microsoft Azure allows for the hosting of SQL Server databases either through the Microsoft Azure SQL database service, the Microsoft SQL Server Managed Instance offering, or by creating a dedicated virtual server in the cloud. Microsoft Azure SQL Database service works well for straightforward database designs since the full features of SQL Server are not all available to the end user. Microsoft SQL Server Managed Instance service gets closer to offering the full features of SQL Server although there are still a few limitations. Obviously, Microsoft SQL Server Managed Instance is meant for end users willing to administrate and maintain a larger number of databases with more complex hosting requirements.

The reasons for using SQL Server cloud hosting are many. First, there is the scalability factor. Cloud SQL Server databases can be scaled much more quickly than on premise resources to allow organizations to quickly scale their databases in response to increased demand. This contrasts to slower scalability for on premise SQL Server where servers and licenses would have to be procured before scalability can be achieved. Second, there are better options for backup, recovery, disaster recovery, and other redundancies across regions or even countries to protect your databases in the event of unforeseen circumstances.

When using SQL Server you have several options for hosting the SQL Server database. One you can host the SQL Server database yourself if you have the requisite hardware and desire to host your own SQL Server database. For many small and medium size businesses, however, SQL Server hosting can present a challenge. Fortunately, with the increased Internet bandwidth available today, many businesses are turning to outsourcing their SQL Server hosting to companies like Lemington or using SQL Azure.

SQL Azure is a robust platform for SQL Server hosting, although there are a number of limitations placed on what you can do with a SQL Azure hosted database. SQL Server hosting companies like Lemington can be more flexibile in their hosting environments and offer more options and fewer limitations on hosting a SQL Server database. Which option is better depends on the specific hosting situation.

Outsourcing SQL Server hosting is economical because the server, maintenance and SQL Server licensing costs can be spread across many hosting customers, thus reducing the hosting cost for any individual hosting customer. If you are interested in exploring the outsourcing of your SQL Server database please contact us for more information.

Yes, SQL Server has its own reporting engine beginning with SQL Server 2005. SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is a web-based, enterprise class reporting engine supporting many advanced reporting features. SSRS can be deployed in two different scenarios: the standard SSRS deployment and a SharePoint integrated deployment which allows users to view SSRS reports inside an existing SharePoint web site.

Paramaterized reports, report subscriptions, support for non-SQL Server data sources, custom security and role-based security, and report drill down are just a few of the features of SSRS. In addition, reports can be exported in a variety of formats including Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, PDF, and text files (comma separated values (csv), etc. Based SSRS reporting features can be found the Express edition of SQL Server, with the Standard, Business Intelligence and Enterprise editions providing many of the more advanced SSRS features.

SSRS has the ability to import report designs from other reporting engines such as Microsoft Access. This import capabiility can help smooth the transition from Microsoft Access to a SQL Server based solution by allowing you to upgrade your Microsoft Access reports seemlessly without having to create the underlying reports.

Yes, starting with SQL Server 2008 there is now support for Spatial data including a Spatial data type and Spatial indexes. Planar and geodetic data types are now supported in all versions of SQL Server. Support for the geometry data type includes the ability to store ploygons, lines and other two dimensional data such as geographic data, architectural or engineering design data. The Geography data type supports integration with location aware services such as Microsoft Virtual Earth. Store map and location directly in the database and retrieve this information to displaying in mapping applications or other location aware services.

With SQL Server 2005, Microsoft introduced SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) to replace the older Data Transformation Services (DTS) available in SQL Server 2000 and earlier versions. SSIS provides a wealth of integration capabilities between everything from flat files (text files, comma separated value or .csv files), to Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, Oracle, DB2, SAP, Teradata, and many other data sources. Data cannot only be integrated but transformed as well, including complex transformations using .NET programming.

All versions of sQL Server contain the standard Import/Export Wizard which can handle many common data integration tasks. Beyond this, the Standard and Business Intelligence editions provide for basic transformations and data profiling. The full set of SSIS features is now only available in the Enterprise Edition of SQL Server including support for data mining, SAP integration, high performance data transfers, and various types of lookup transformations.

SQL Server managed services means outsourcing the day-to-day operation of your database platform rather than employing a database administrator in-house. A managed service typically covers monitoring, patching, backup verification, performance tuning, capacity planning, security configuration, and being on call when something breaks.

The distinction that matters is between consulting and managed services. Consulting is project work with an end date - a migration, an upgrade, a performance investigation. Managed services is ongoing: somebody is responsible for your databases continuously, and you are not the one who finds out at 2am that a backup has been silently failing for three weeks.

Most organizations reach for managed services at the point where SQL Server has become important enough to need real attention, but not large enough to justify a full-time DBA salary.

It comes down to how much genuine DBA work you have. A full-time database administrator is a significant salary, and in most mid-sized organizations the role is not full-time - there are bursts of intense work around migrations and incidents, separated by long periods of routine maintenance that could be automated or handled in a few hours a month.

Outsourcing tends to make sense when you need senior expertise occasionally. It tends not to make sense when your databases are the core of your product and need someone embedded in the engineering team.

A middle path many organizations take: keep an internal generalist who understands the applications, and bring in outside DBAs for the specialist work - performance tuning, high-availability design, migrations, and security review.

This question usually comes from a misunderstanding of how Azure SQL Database is limited. There is no cap on the number of user accounts you can create in an Azure SQL Database - you can add as many database users and logins as you need.

What is limited is concurrent activity: the number of simultaneous sessions, and the number of concurrent workers actively executing requests. Both scale with the service tier and compute size you choose, so a small database on a low tier supports far fewer concurrent connections than a large one on a higher tier.

The practical implication is that the question to ask is not "how many users" but "how many of those users are hitting the database at the same time, and how heavy are their queries". A thousand occasional users may need less capacity than fifty running heavy reports simultaneously.

Microsoft publishes the concurrent session and worker limits for each service tier, and those limits are revised as tiers change, so it is worth checking the current resource limits for your specific tier rather than relying on a remembered figure.

Both are managed Azure database services, but they solve different problems.

Azure SQL Database gives you a single database as a service. It is the cleanest option for new applications, but it does not expose instance-level features - there is no SQL Server Agent in the traditional sense, no cross-database queries in the way you may be used to, and no CLR or Service Broker.

Azure SQL Managed Instance gives you something much closer to a full SQL Server instance, with the instance-level features that existing applications often depend on. It exists largely to make lift-and-shift migrations possible without rewriting applications.

The rule of thumb: if you are building something new, start with Azure SQL Database. If you are moving an existing application that relies on instance-level features and you do not want to re-engineer it, Managed Instance is usually the shorter path. Managed Instance generally carries a higher baseline cost, so it is worth confirming which features you actually depend on before assuming you need it.

The honest answer is that it depends on why you are asking. Moving to the cloud is usually worth it when you want to stop buying and maintaining hardware, when your workload varies enough that elastic capacity saves money, or when your disaster recovery plan currently depends on hardware sitting in one building.

It is usually not worth it purely to save money on a stable, well-understood workload running on hardware you already own. Cloud database costs are predictable but not automatically lower, and a lift-and-shift migration that ignores this often produces a larger bill than the servers it replaced.

The questions worth answering before deciding: what are your actual recovery time and recovery point objectives, what does your current setup cost including staff time, how variable is the load, and are there data residency or compliance constraints on where the data can live?

This varies enormously between providers, and the differences matter more than the headline price. Questions worth asking any provider, including us:

• Are backups taken, and are restores tested - or merely scheduled?
• What is the recovery time objective, and has it ever been measured?
• Who applies SQL Server and operating system patches, and on what schedule?
• Is the database monitored for performance, or only for whether it is up?
• Who owns the data, and how do you get it back if you leave?
• Where does the data physically reside?

A backup that has never been restored is not a backup. If a provider cannot answer the second question with a date, treat the first answer with caution.

They do different jobs and are often used together.

Power BI is the presentation and self-service layer - dashboards, reports, and the ability for business users to explore data themselves. For many organizations, Power BI connecting directly to a well-structured database is the whole solution.

SQL Server Analysis Services is a modeling layer that sits between raw data and the reports. It becomes worth the effort when you have significant data volumes, when the same business logic is being reimplemented in report after report, or when several teams need to work from one agreed definition of measures such as "revenue" or "active customer".

A reasonable progression: start with Power BI against a clean data source, then introduce a semantic model when you find yourself maintaining the same calculation in five different reports, or when report performance degrades as the data grows.

In most cases the cause is one of a small number of things: missing or unhelpful indexes, queries written in a way that prevents the optimizer doing its job, statistics that no longer reflect the data, blocking between concurrent transactions, or genuinely insufficient memory and disk throughput.

The order matters. Adding hardware to a query problem is expensive and often disappointing - it is common to find that a single missing index accounts for most of the pain, and that the server was never the constraint.

A tuning engagement normally starts with measurement rather than changes: capturing what is actually running, which queries consume the most resources, and where the time is being spent. Changes made before that measurement exists tend to be guesses.

Standard Edition is sufficient for most organizations. Enterprise Edition costs substantially more per core and is justified by specific capabilities rather than general performance - the main ones being unrestricted use of memory and cores, online index operations, and the more advanced high-availability configurations.

The most common reasons organizations genuinely need Enterprise are a high-availability requirement that Standard cannot meet, or a workload large enough to exceed Standard's memory and core limits.

Because SQL Server is licensed per core, edition choice interacts with hardware sizing in ways that can be expensive to get wrong in either direction - over-provisioning cores raises the license cost, while under-provisioning forces an upgrade later. It is worth modeling before purchasing.

The starting point is not a backup schedule; it is two numbers. Your recovery point objective is how much data you can afford to lose, measured in time. Your recovery time objective is how long you can afford to be down. Everything else follows from those, and most organizations have never written them down.

Once you have them, the shape of the answer is usually: full backups on a schedule, differential or transaction log backups frequent enough to satisfy the recovery point objective, copies held somewhere a problem in your primary location cannot reach, and - the part most often skipped - restores tested on a regular basis.

An untested backup is an assumption. The failure we see most often is not the absence of backups, but the discovery during an actual incident that they cannot be restored within the time the business needs.

See also: Managed Cloud Backup & Disaster Recovery Services.

Yes. SQL Server work is almost entirely remote in practice - monitoring, tuning, migrations and administration do not require anyone to be in the building, and have not for years.

Lemington Consulting has offices in Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Fairfax, Miami, Tampa and Jacksonville, and serves clients across North America and internationally. Where a project genuinely benefits from someone on site, that can be arranged.

Regular support hours are 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM Eastern Time, Monday through Friday.

Outside those hours on weekdays, support is still available. Weekend support is provided in the event of an emergency, and in practice we have done a great deal of weekend work over the years - when a production database is down on a Saturday, that is not something that waits until Monday morning.

We deliberately do not describe this as 24/7, because that implies a staffed overnight desk we do not operate. What it is in practice: a long weekday window, availability outside it, and a track record of turning out at weekends when the situation genuinely calls for it.

If continuous round-the-clock coverage is a firm requirement for your environment, that is worth discussing directly rather than assuming a standard arrangement covers it.