What this work covers
Five kinds of work sit under SQL Server: performance, resilience, migration, licensing and security. Here is what each one actually involves, what it fixes, and how to tell whether your estate needs it right now.
The gap between the "Rockstar" and the MSP.
A healthy SQL Server estate has to do a few things at once: run fast, stay up, move cleanly when it has to, cost the right amount, and stay secure.
The market usually gives you two bad choices. You can hire a "rockstar" consultant who drops in for $5,000, writes a few indexes, hands you a PDF, and vanishes. Or you can sign with a massive MSP that wants a 5-year contract and puts a junior helpdesk agent on your critical P1 outage.
The useful shape is the middle one: the diagnostic depth of a boutique consultancy, paired with a provider that stays to govern the estate with the rigour and response commitments of an enterprise managed service. Whoever you hire, that is the combination worth testing for.
A large food and beverage distributor paid $5k to a famous "SQL Rockstar" for a one-off performance fix that yielded zero improvement. They called us. We took over the environment under our managed service. We fixed the performance issue, stabilized the estate, and five years later, they are still our client.
SQL Server performance tuning
Reading what the server is waiting on, and fixing that before buying more cores.
Hardware is expensive; tuning is cheap. Before you buy more cores to solve a performance problem, we identify the exact queries causing the bottleneck. We fix them, document the ROI, and prove the before-and-after.
- Optimizing queries to delay expensive hardware upgrades
- Removing application bottlenecks that frustrate your users
- Tuning server configurations to maximize your existing investment
- Resolving deadlocks that cause silent transactional failures
"A single missing index can turn a 30-second query into 30 milliseconds. That is pure ROI."
High availability and disaster recovery
Staying up when something fails, sized to what an outage would actually cost.
A failover is corruption insurance; clusters protect the data first and failover is the byproduct. Before any of it, two numbers set the budget: how much data the business can afford to lose (RPO) and how long it can afford to be down (RTO). Buy the resilience those two numbers justify — not more, not less.
- Business continuity with Always On Availability Groups
- Whole-instance failover for legacy applications
- Cost-effective disaster recovery architectures
- Auditable, cross-region restore testing
"A backup you have never restored is a massive, unquantified business risk."
Migrations and upgrades
Changing platform or version with the business still running through it.
When cloud costs spiral out of control, we execute full cloud repatriations to bring workloads safely back to your own hardware. The shape is the same every time: know what you have, test the move on a copy, then cut over in a window you control with a rollback ready.
- Lift-and-shift to Azure Virtual Machines, with the workload intact
- Modernization via Azure SQL Managed Instance
- Cloud Repatriation to drastically cut OPEX
- In-place version upgrades to maintain vendor support
"Most migration disasters are not technical. They are a cutover with no rollback plan."
Managed SQL Server service
Specialist cover, rather than SQL Server as one line on a helpdesk rota.
Broad MSPs handle helpdesk; SQL Server is the whole job here. Managed cover means proactive 24/7 monitoring, capacity planning and incident response, and the thing to compare between providers is who answers and how early they see it coming. The tiers and the detail live on the Virtual DBA page.
- 24/7 monitoring and rapid incident resolution
- Proactive security patching and compliance maintenance
- Guaranteed backups and disaster recovery preparedness
- Local NZ-based SQL Server experts, not offshore support
"The peace of mind knowing our data is managed by actual SQL experts, not just a helpdesk, is invaluable."
The full SQL Server picture, page by page.
Performance, resilience and migrations are covered above. Ongoing, on contract, or the moment something breaks: each shape has a page of its own.
Virtual DBA
Ongoing managed cover: a named senior DBA watching, patching and restore-testing the estate, so outages get headed off before they happen.
SQL Server support
Something's wrong now — an incident, a stalled migration, a second opinion. Senior help, not a helpdesk queue.
Contract DBA
Rent senior SQL Server depth for a project, a departure, or the whole function. Flexible terms, no permanent hire.
Licensing audit
Find what you're overpaying. Across the estates we audit, 20 to 40% of the SQL bill usually turns out to be recoverable. Read-only, no production impact.
Compliance
The evidence auditors actually ask for: access, encryption, patching, recoverability — and a plan to close the gaps.
Security
A hardened estate: least-privilege access, encryption at rest and in transit, and a patching cadence you can prove.
Non-profit? No charge.
The price for enterprise-grade SQL Server support and performance tuning is often out of reach for non-profit organizations, leaving their data vulnerable to outages and risk.
Registered non-profits pay nothing for this work. Our sponsors cover it in full. Email info@sqldba.org with what you run, and you get a straight yes or no on whether you qualify.
Not sure which one 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. A free read-only health check will tell you whether the real risk is performance, recoverability, licensing or all three, and the graded report is yours to keep.