Customer Story
How TaxSlayer Meets Peak Tax Season on SQL Server with WISdom
TaxSlayer’s DBA team uses WISdom, SQL Server performance monitoring with FinOps built in, to validate every fix before the traffic hits, tune by cost instead of guesswork, and walk into tax season knowing the estate will hold.
Customer Profile
Customer: TaxSlayer
Industry: Accounting / Tax Software
Website: taxslayer.com
Spotlight: Bryan Maynard, Senior Database Administrator (DBA)
Key Outcomes:
- Validated for 200% of normal workload before peak
- Faster, evidence-based query tuning
- Cost-ranked fixes that lower total system cost over time
- Responsive US-based SQL Server experts
The Deadline Nobody Can Move
Tax season is not a surprise. It is a wall on the calendar, and every year the traffic climbs toward it. For Bryan Maynard, Senior DBA at TaxSlayer, the job is making sure the SQL Server estate is ready to take that load without flinching.
“We have a period of time where we know traffic is going to spike,” Bryan says. “We need to make sure our systems are ready for it.”
Getting there means load testing, performance tuning, and one thing that is harder than it sounds: knowing whether a change actually helped. Before WISdom, Bryan’s team wanted a more reliable way to compare how the system behaved across two windows of time, so a fix could be measured instead of assumed.
From Guesswork to Evidence: Workload Compare
When there is no fire to fight, the team drops into deep-dive mode: IO, wait stats, and the queries dragging on the system. Health scores and query-level cost metrics put the worst offenders right at the top, so the effort lands where it pays off.
“Now we can say, ‘Here’s the change we made. Did it help? Did it hurt?’ That’s a really valuable feature.”
This is Find / Fix / Prove in daily practice. The team uses those comparisons to find high-cost stored procedures, adjust indexes, and clear bottlenecks, then prove the impact of each fix before moving to the next one. If a change works, they keep it. If it does not, they back it out. That is how the estate gets to the starting line ready.
Tuning by Cost, Not by Noise
When there is no fire to fight, the team drops into deep-dive mode: IO, wait stats, and the queries dragging on the system. Health scores and query-level cost metrics put the worst offenders right at the top, so the effort lands where it pays off.
“We play whack-a-mole—but it’s smart whack-a-mole,” he jokes. “If we handle the highest-cost queries first, we bring the overall system cost down over time.”
That is the difference between watching a dashboard and acting on one. Every query carries a dollar cost, and working the most expensive ones first is how a tuning session turns into a lower bill.
Support That Actually Supports
Bryan is quick to name the support experience as a real differentiator. WISdom is backed by US-based SQL Server experts, not a tier-one queue reading from a script.
“It’s been better than any vendor I’ve worked with,” he says. “Real people answering real questions—and quickly. That’s rare.”
“It’s been better than any vendor I’ve worked with,” he says. “Real people answering real questions—and quickly. That’s rare.”
During onboarding, TaxSlayer came in with specific security and configuration requirements. Fortified’s team listened and made product changes to meet them, with Bryan’s onboarding engineer, Stephen, leading the way.
“Stephen was sharp. I don’t think I asked a single question he didn’t have an answer for,” Bryan says. “We communicated our requirements, and the team delivered.”
That responsiveness did not stop at go-live. From tuning advice to feature feedback, the support has stayed hands-on.
“Even with the tools we already had, getting answers was frustrating. With Fortified, it’s been a breath of fresh air—fast, thoughtful, and always on point.”
Advice to Other Teams
“Know what problem you’re trying to solve before you go looking for a tool,” Bryan advises. “WISdom can do monitoring, tuning, FinOps—but you need to understand your priorities first. Otherwise, you’re just turning knobs without knowing why.”
The Value of WISdom
“It gives me a lot of information I can’t get from other sources,” Bryan says. “The opportunities page, the health scores, the ability to act on slow queries—it’s all right there. And unlike some legacy tools, it’s not cumbersome to navigate.”
Key Outcomes:
- Ready for the surge: validated to handle 200% of normal workload, with no outages at annual peak
- Faster tuning: high-cost queries, wait stats, and stored procedures fixed with evidence, not guesswork
- Better decisions: side-by-side workload data from Workload Compare proves each change before the next one
- Expert support: US-based SQL Server experts who understand the real-world DBA job and answer fast
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