What we do
We talk to peers, not procurement. You get someone who has been there at 2:39am, restoring a database that should never have been at risk.
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, stay secure, and keep doing all of that next year. We cover the lot. Below are the three we get called in for most — performance, resilience and migrations — plus the managed service that keeps them that way, and the rest underneath.
SQL Server performance tuning
We find what your server is waiting on, and fix it.
Slow SQL Server is almost never a mystery. The server records exactly what it's waiting on. We read that, find the few queries and settings causing the pain, fix them, and show you the before-and-after.
Book a review- Indexes that scan millions of rows when they could seek a few hundred
- Query plans wrecked by implicit conversions and SELECT star
- tempdb contention, memory and MAXDOP still on defaults
- Stale statistics, blocking, and deadlocks
A single missing index can turn a 30-second query into 30 milliseconds.
High availability and disaster recovery
Stay up when something fails. Come back when something bigger does.
Most outages we see come from confusing the two, or from a backup nobody ever tested. We start with two numbers: how much data you can lose (RPO) and how long you can be down (RTO). Everything else follows.
Book a review- Always On Availability Groups, on Standard or Enterprise
- Failover Cluster Instances for whole-instance failover
- Log shipping as a cheap, reliable DR fallback
- Cross-region backups that are actually restore-tested
A backup you have never restored is not a backup. It's a hope. We test the restore, so you know.
Migrations and upgrades
On-prem, Azure, or a new version. Without breaking things.
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. The surprises live in the testing people skip.
Book a review- SQL Server on an Azure VM, closest to what you have now
- Azure SQL Managed Instance, the usual landing spot
- Azure SQL Database, best for new builds
- In-place version upgrade with compatibility level kept
Most migration disasters are not technical. They are a cutover with no rollback plan. We always have one.
Managed SQL Server service
We keep it healthy, so you don't have to watch it.
We monitor your estate with the same diagnostics we run on every assessment, catch problems while they're small, and handle patching, backups and tuning in the background. You get a named senior DBA who already knows your systems — not a ticket queue.
Book a review- Monitoring and alerting we actually action, not just a dashboard
- Patching and cumulative updates, planned around you
- Backups restore-tested on a schedule, not left to hope
- A named senior DBA who knows your estate
The best outage is the one you never hear about — because we headed it off the week before.
The rest of the SQL Server picture.
Performance, resilience, migration and the managed service are the day-to-day. These three each have a home of their own.
Licensing audit
Find what you're overpaying. We usually take 20 to 40% off the SQL bill — 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.
Not sure which one you need? Start with the health check.
One read-only pass tells you where the real risk is — performance, recoverability, licensing or all three. We change nothing on your servers, and the graded report is yours to keep.