Leland Management

Background

Leland Management is one of the largest and most well-respected real estate management companies in the state of Florida. In the past 20 years, Leland has grown from a single employee to more than 400 employees managing 400+ communities throughout 14 offices statewide.

In 2019, Leland started experiencing major slowdowns with its third-party property management software. The systems were so slow that it impacted their ability to complete their monthly invoicing on time, as well as other critical business functions.

When they approached their software vendor regarding the speed issues, they were told to upgrade their hardware which often comes with a six-figure price tag.

Leland engaged Red9 to validate the advice of their third-party software vendor.

After running a thorough evaluation including our proprietary 145-Point Health Check, Red9 determined that the hardware upgrade was not only costly and unnecessary but would not resolve the speed issues. In fact, the issues Leland was experiencing were being caused by the way the queries were written within the third-party software.

Leland had two choices to resolve their issues: build custom software in-house to replace their property management vendor or continue to try to work with what they had.

Ripping and replacing their existing solution would not only have been costly for Leland but also time-consuming. Instead, Leland chose to work with Red9 and joined our managed services program.

Every month, Red9 tunes and optimizes Leland’s database to continually make it faster and more stable.

As a result, Red9 was able to resolve Leland’s speed issues which allowed them to forgo the expense of the hardware upgrade and/or replacing their existing software.

Problem

Red9 identified multiple SQL Server problems:

• The client received bad guidance from its third-party software vendor due to the vendor’s lack of experience in high-volume SQL Servers.
• The third-party software vendor's software was inundated with extremely inefficiently written SQL queries.
• SQL Server was lacking numerous SQL Server best practices, maintenance and monitoring.

Solution

At Red9 we always start with our proprietary 145-Point SQL Server Health Check which we use to uncover a variety of technical issues.

• Using our SQL Server Audit list, we analyzed and prioritized all SQL-related issues.
• Deployed SQL Server best practices, including security, maintenance, configuration, Windows OS settings, storage configuration changes, how databases and files were spread across disks, and more.
• Deployed SQL Server monitoring and alerting to catch problems proactively.
• Worked with the third-party software vendor to identify how to best work together.
  We've created a new way to apply SQL performance tuning changes safely, without affecting third-party software vendors, their patches, or voiding support.
• Red9 has been continuously tracking down worst-performing queries and performance tuning them.

Slow queries are being identified using two methods:

• Leland identified a screen of the software which was slow and Red9 then identified which SQL statements were invoked.
• Red9 identified the slowest SQL statements client ran over the last 14 or 30 days, aggregated, and made SQL performance improvements.

Results

The six-figure SQL Server hardware upgrade project was deemed unnecessary and postponed indefinitely. Mostly because SQL performance tuning achieved necessary performance metrics.

• Higher SQL Server capacity and speed:
• Reduced complaints – internal employees and external customers are no longer complaining about how slow software works, increasing satisfaction in clients’ services.
• Higher SQL Server capacity and speed:
  • Since the start of the engagement, about 75 slow queries have been performance tuned:
  • Average query run duration was decreased by 9x.
  • Average storage cycle consumption was decreased by 146x.
  • Average CPU processing time necessary was reduced by 83x.