Where the advice comes from.
We're a New Zealand SQL Server practice. That is all we do. Not networks, not helpdesk, not "IT". SQL Server. Everything written on this site comes out of that one job, done for twenty years.
Run by Adrian Sullivan — 20+ years on SQL Server, founder of sqldba in 2019.
Meet the Principal DBA.
You don't need a "rockstar" who drops in, writes a few indexes, hands over a PDF, and vanishes. And you don't need a bloated MSP that puts a junior helpdesk agent on your critical P1 outage.
I built sqldba to sit in the middle of those two: the depth of a boutique consultancy, with the long-term governance and written response commitments of an enterprise managed service.
Most of the job is translation. Technical debt into board-level risk, a licensing liability into a number someone can approve, a patched estate into a governed one. Most of what I know about that is written down on this site, so you can use it on your own estate without calling anyone.
Where the quick-fix scripts run out is where this work starts, and it gets measured over years rather than a single visit.
We talk to peers, not procurement.
You don't need another account manager pushing an SLA at you. You need someone who can say what downtime actually costs this business, in numbers a board will accept.
That is what a principal specialist is for: the escalation point on the data platform, and a straight read of which operational and licensing costs are avoidable. The test to apply to any provider is whether outages get headed off or merely reported, and whether the bill goes down as well as the risk.
We find the risk you can't see.
Your servers are running fine today. But underneath, there may be quiet liabilities waiting to strike: an untested disaster recovery plan, a massive licensing true-up waiting in an overpowered VM, or an unsecured legacy system. We find it, quantify the exact financial risk to the board, and fix it.
We fit around what you already have.
We are not trying to replace your IT partner or run your whole estate. We are the specialists you bring in for the hard parts: risk, performance, licensing, recoverability. We are happy to work alongside your existing provider, as an escalation point, the overflow on a busy estate, or the deep dive nobody else runs. We will also tell you, plainly, when someone else is the better fit.
New Zealand based, and the work travels.
Home is New Zealand, and that is where most of our clients are. A slow query looks the same in Sydney or Seattle, and we have active clients in Australia and the United States, with others further afield. Nearly all of it runs remotely — secure access to your estate, not a plane ticket — so a failed backup or a runaway licence bill gets the same senior attention wherever the server happens to live.
The numbers behind the work.
Across the assessments we have run, clients have stopped paying for more than NZ$50 million in SQL Server licences they did not need — averaging about $7 million a year. We have run over 20,000 instance assessments, using our open-source diagnostic engine, SQLTriage, to map technical debt directly to your compliance and risk frameworks.
Figures are aggregated across client engagements since 2019; the underlying data is client-confidential, available to qualified buyers under NDA.
The number usually pays for itself.
Licensed for SQL Server Enterprise, using none of its features — a ~$200k liability sitting on the balance sheet. We confirmed Standard Edition covered the workload and moved them across. The risk was gone, and the saving was booked before the next renewal.
$20k to save $200k. Best buy ever.Chris, CEO
SQL deadlocks were interrupting logistics operations — orders stalling, staff re-keying, the business feeling it. Targeted performance work cut them by 92%, turning an unpredictable system into a steady one.
We can see a huge reduction in deadlocks.Deep, IT Manager
A 20TB database took up to six hours to back up against a two-hour recovery objective — meaning the business was quietly out of SLA and exposed if it ever had to restore. Compression brought it to 12TB and back inside the window. The exposure closed.
I didn't even know this was possible.Susan, Senior DBA
Not sure who you need?
Tell us what is going on. A senior DBA reads every message and points you at the right next step, even when that is not us.