Blog
Technical guides and positions on performance, licensing, migration routes and the data platform choices in front of most teams right now. Written by consultants, not commissioned.
Resources
Guides, client stories and events
Everything Fortified Data publishes, in one place: technical writing from the consultants who do the work, client engagements with the numbers they produced, and the sessions where you can ask a question and get an answer from the person who ran it.
Written and presented by the team that runs these environments.
What Fortified Data publishes
Fortified Data publishes four kinds of material: technical guides on database performance, migration, licensing, security and modernization; client case studies stating the measured outcome of an engagement; solution briefs covering assessments, managed services and consulting; and webinars and conference sessions presented by its own consultants. The blog, the case studies, the webinars and the events listing are the four sections below, and the solution briefs and client stories are published as documents.
A resources page usually answers the question "what have you got?". That is rarely the question a reader arrived with. The list below is grouped by what you are trying to decide instead, because the useful answer is almost always one guide and one assessment rather than a category.
Where a guide takes a position you disagree with, that is the guide working. The writing here names version floors, licensing routes and migration sequences, so some of it will not apply to your environment and you will be able to tell which.
Start here
Whichever question you actually arrived with
Six decisions that bring people to this section, and what to read for each.
- Where does our environment actually stand? Start with the database health check, which is the assessment the rest of this site keeps referring back to. The case studies show the kind of thing assessments of that sort turn up, and how much it was worth once fixed.
- Should this move, and where to? What cloud migration services are covers the general shape, and PostgreSQL against Oracle on licensing cost covers the specific move most often driven by a renewal notice. The engagement is migrations and upgrades.
- Do we hire a DBA or hand this to a partner? What mid-market companies get wrong about managed databases is written for exactly that decision. On-Call DBA is the arrangement teams most often land on before committing to either.
- Is our data ready for what the business wants from AI? Database upgrades for AI frameworks and resilient data pipelines cover the groundwork. The AI readiness assessment answers the question against your environment rather than in general.
- What replaces our data warehouse? Lakehouse, warehouse or lake and Microsoft Fabric against a legacy warehouse are the two comparisons worth reading first. Data modernization is the delivery side of that answer.
- Can we just talk to somebody? The webinars page carries seven recorded sessions in full, and the events page lists where the team is speaking next. Anything more specific goes through contact us, and a scoped question usually gets a faster answer than a general one.
The four sections
Each one is maintained rather than archived. Where something is out of date, it says so instead of being quietly deleted.
Case Studies
Eleven client engagements, each stated as what changed in the database environment and by how much, across healthcare, financial services, pharmaceutical, insurance and four more sectors.
Webinars
Seven recorded sessions on performance strategy, legacy modernization, cloud cost, database security and SQL Server end of life, each presented by the consultant who does the work. Free, and no registration.
Events
Conferences and industry events where the team is speaking next, and the ones it has already attended.
Why this material is worth the time
Published out of delivery work
The author ran the engagement
The guides and the sessions come from the consultants on the work rather than from a content agency briefed on it. Every past session below is listed with the name of the person who presented it, which is the quickest way to check that claim.
Specific enough to be wrong
Advice general enough to be safe is advice general enough to be useless. The writing here commits to version floors, migration sequences and licensing positions, so you can tell within a paragraph whether it describes your environment.
Each item says what to do next
Every guide and outcome links to the assessment or engagement it belongs to, so the distance from reading something to scoping the work it implies is one click rather than a sequence of emails.
Client stories
Six engagements, written up in full
Each one links to the case study itself rather than to a download. Six industries, six different problems, and in every case what was actually measured afterwards.
Insurance: a 3,500-database upgrade on a deadline
A large North American insurer moved off SQL Server 2012 across 3,500 databases and 300 applications, encrypted and migrated without losing service. The case study sets out the sequencing that made the schedule arguable rather than optimistic.
Financial services: retiring servers before migrating them
A $35 billion asset manager had a sprawling SQL Server estate and a cloud migration in front of it. Consolidating first, rather than lifting the sprawl into Azure, is the decision the whole engagement turns on.
Mortgage technology: storage rebuilt rather than bought
Five critical databases at a leading mortgage platform were compressed instead of expanded, with index compression reclaiming more on top. A worked example of treating storage growth as a design question.
Pharmaceutical: a licensing bill cut in half
An assessment of 110 SQL Servers at an international pharmaceutical company found enough optimization and consolidation to halve annual licensing, and improved availability across the estate while doing it.
Healthcare communications: from reactive to proactive
A healthcare technology platform moved off firefighting and onto managed optimization, with the critical stored procedures clinicians were waiting on rebuilt and the estate expanded onto PostgreSQL.
Motorsports: a configuration audit that paid for itself
A development instance at an elite racing organization was running an edition it did not need, and the same review found a high-risk availability configuration before race operations met it.
Common questions about the resource library
What does Fortified Data publish?
Technical guides on the Fortified Data blog, client case studies, recorded webinars, solution briefs on assessments and on the managed services and consulting practices, and conference sessions presented by Fortified Data consultants. The blog, case studies, webinars and events are sections of this site; the solution briefs and client stories are published as documents from the resources page.
Who writes the Fortified Data blog?
The consultants and DBAs who deliver the engagements, rather than a marketing agency. The same people present the webinars, which are published on the Fortified Data webinars page with the presenter named, including Frank Gill on SQL Server upgrades and cloud cost, Angela Henry on database security, and Chad Timms on AI data readiness.
Where can I see Fortified Data client results?
The Fortified Data case studies page states the outcome of eleven client engagements, each with the figure it produced, across healthcare, financial services, pharmaceutical, insurance, mortgage technology, fleet technology and professional motorsports. Three further client stories, covering Global Payments, Fresenius Medical Care and Allstate, are published as documents on the resources page.
Does Fortified Data run webinars, and can I watch past ones?
Yes. Seven recorded webinars are available in full on the Fortified Data webinars page, covering database performance strategy, legacy modernization, cloud cost optimization, database security and SQL Server upgrades. They are free to watch and need no registration. Upcoming conference appearances are listed separately on the events page.
What is in a Fortified Data solution brief?
A solution brief describes the shape of one practice: what the engagement covers, how it is delivered and what a client receives. Three are published, covering enterprise data architecture assessments, database managed services and database consulting services. They are written for circulating internally when somebody has to explain a proposed engagement to a budget holder.
How current is the material on the Fortified Data resources page?
The blog and the webinars are maintained continuously, and every past session stays published rather than being removed once it has run. Where a guide describes a product version or a licensing position that has since changed, Fortified Data updates the guide rather than deleting it, because the original position is usually why somebody found it.
Read something here that describes your environment?
The fastest way to find out whether it does is an assessment of what you actually run, which reports on the same things these guides argue about. Or start with a conversation and bring the guide with you.
Let us show you what's possible.