Migrations, Upgrades, Disaster recovery, vacation coverage, temporary extension of your team, custom development and more.
When you need an unbiased check-up of your SQL Server to know where you stand.
Translating business requirements into an actual blueprint for your new SQL Server environment.
Scoped DBA services
Fixed price vs hourly billing
We believe that timesheet based work only suits for certain tasks. Usually, it brings more plannability, security and speed of implementation if we agree on a fixed price upfront.
Discovery workshop
That’s why we offer you a one hour workshop where you walk us through the task and describe what a successful outcome would be for you.
We will ask you a bunch of detailed questions and then we create a tailored, fixed price offering for this exact task.
The workshop is priced at € 199 but will be deducted from the first invoice if we agree to do the resulting project together.
This approach works very well for server upgrades, database migrations or custom development tasks.
Hourly billing
However, some tasks are bound to be billed by the hour – and we are fine with this. Think about vacation coverage, extending your team on a part-time basis or doing a set of tasks that is known to take X hours.
Our rates for this kind of work are:
– 8 hrs / week minimum – € 175/hr *
– 16 hrs / week minimum – € 150/hr
– 24 hrs / week minimun – € 125/hr
These rates are senior DBA level with 20+ years of experience.
* Terms and conditions:
Prices excl. VAT.,
Minimum hours that will be billed. If you go over, that is what will be billed. Hours do not carry over.
Business hours only (9am to 6pm German time). 50 percent extra charge for off hours and Saturdays, 100 percent for Sundays and public holidays.
Special Care Service
The special care service is designed to be your insurance policy. When disaster strikes, timing is critical and you are prepared.
All the paperwork will be done already, all required remote access has been granted and is verified working, so we can get right to work helping you get back to business.
This is more than just an emergency service though. Depending on your selected level, we will
– Check your servers (either designated ones or round robin) for common problems at least once per week, also verifying that the remote access is still
working
– Notify you upfront if we notice something going wrong (filling logs, missing backups, failed jobs, attempted break-ins, degrading performance etc.)
– Know how your server is behaving under normal conditions.
– Over time, capacity planning will get more accurate. We will be able to project future growth based on past measures so that we can give you an early
warning in case the server approaches resource exhaustion.
Additionally, we will be available for non-emergency meetings, such as team meetings, vendor discussions or evaluations that do not classify as an emergency. Subject to availability of our staff.
The special care service is not based on timesheets or other pay per use KPIs. Everything outlined in the service plan description will be covered by the monthly fee. Additional services can be booked as add-ons.
Essential
| 1 monthly emergency support incident |
| 1 server check per week |
| One authorized caller |
| Annual health check of 5 servers |
2 business days email response time |
€ 1.499 *
Standard
| 2 monthly emergency support incidents |
| 2 server checks per week |
| Two authorized callers |
| Annual health check of 10 servers |
1 business day email response time |
€ 2.499 *
Enterprise
| 4 monthly emergency support incidents |
| 5 server checks per week |
| Three authorized callers |
| Semi-annual health check of 10 servers |
4 hours email response time |
€ 3.499 *
* Terms and conditions:
Prices excl. VAT.
6 or 12 month contract, monthly billing cycle. Paid monthly in advance. 60 day termination notice required
Can be changed to a higher or lower plan as necessary after an initial 3 month period.
There is no limit to the amount of SQL Servers you are hosting, all are covered. If you have more than 10 servers though, we suggest to talk to us about
increasing the number of incidents per month. Otherwise every additional incident raised will be treated the same as our emergency help offer.
Definitions:
An incident means your production server is down or performance is severely degraded. Unused incidents roll over for one month.
An authorized caller is the person who can declare an emergency. This means you will need to designate someone who can use the allotted incidents and
you need to funnel all communications through your proper channels.
A server check is a semi-automated process where we look for common issues such as alerts, failed jobs, critical warnings and baseline your servers
performance since the last check.
The periodic Health check is the same as our separate service „Health check“. We take an in-depth review of the instance and send you the results.
E-Mail response time is limited to business hours (9am – 6pm German Time, Monday to Friday, public holidays excluded).
Add-on services:
Additional incidents above plan – discounted off our regular price list by 20%. Regular price is €250 per hour with a two hour minimum.
20% discount on the rate for timesheet based scoped services for subscibed customers.
Health Check
Should you be investing in regular, independent health checks for your SQL Servers?
Imagine your database server is going down and data and applications becoming unavailable. What would be the price tag associated with this?
And the damage to your reputation with customers and prospects?
The good news? You don’t have to wait for things to go sideways.
By being proactive you can ensure a consistent, more efficient, scalable and highly available SQL Server that’s aligned with industry best practices and performs smoothly.
Our SQL Server health check will help you to
– ensure that your OS, instance and databases settings are properly aligned with proven best practices
– common bottlenecks like parallelism, RAM usage or disk latency are identified
– your HA setup is aligned with your SLAs
– backups and maintenance checks are configured properly
After implementing our recommendations based on the actual findings, you will usually see an increase in transaction throughput and an overall reduction in performance consumptions. This means your SQL will be able to serve considerably more requests with the same hardware as before.
It’s also not uncommon to uncover licensing issues (over- as well as underlicensing). A recent customer was able to save more than 80.000 Euro per year after we uncovered that he reported far too many SA seats.
How does it work?
We will send you an application that you can run on your laptop, a regular workstation or on a Windows Server. The application will connect to your SQL Server with high privileges and run a series of read-only data collectors. Each collector is absolutely lightweight and will not impact your SQL Server notably. The collector results will not contain passwords or other PII – unless something is cached in the plan cache.
The results are then packaged up and you send the resulting file to us for review. Once we analyzed all the results, we will send you a detailed list of our findings and recommendations. When and if you implement them is totally up to you – no obligations.
To go over the findings and recommendations, a 30 minute call will be scheduled after our review. This is usually with your senior DBA and the manager.
Health Check
On-demand execution
Identify bottlenecks that lower your processing throughput
Align HA setup with SLAs
Identify risk of data loss and backup strategy
Identify common issues
€ 499 *
* Terms and conditions:
Price excl. VAT. Paid in advance for new customers. Results are usually delivered within two business days.
Emergency help
Disaster strikes at the most inconvenient times. Maybe your staff is already busy fighting another fire or you team simply doesn’t have the skillset to deal with the emergency.
Don’t spend hours hitting up google or other websites for a possible solution. The most important task is getting your business back online.
Over the years I’ve spent countless hours successfully fighting emergencies. From small businesses that lost their database access to big, international broadcasters experiencing serious performance issues just before a live transmission of a huge event.
Give me a shout and I’ll do my best to give you a break-fix. This offer does not include root cause analysis.
And if you think that this is expensive: It’s about the same price you will pay Microsoft with your credit card in hand, only without the long hold times…
Emergency help
Emergency break-fix
On-demand, no pre-scheduling required
Initial call required to ensure the issue is covered by our skillset
Minimum payable in advance
No root-cause analysis
€250 / hour, 2 hour min
Ask me anything (SQL Server / Azure Data Platform)
One-off
When you need expert input on a very narrow set of questions or you are not yet sure the long-term format gives you the benefits you expect.
€ 199 *
Monthly
The monthly option is usually booked by executives running a more complex project with many integrations and want to make sure they stay on track.
€ 299 *
Bi-weekly
For those customers running complex environments with hybrid environments or ML / BI integrations into the data platform and a strong focus on security.
€ 350 *
When you are not ready to employ a resource but still want expert input on SQL Server or the Azure Data Platform, the „ask me anything“ format could be the perfect fit for you to build up confidence around your questions.
You get to chose the topic of the call, no boundaries – as long as it stays focused on the Microsoft Data Platform. And since I know how hard asking questions as an executive can be: rest assured that everything we talk about stays absolutely confidential. You get my unbiased input, recommendations and I will be available for unlimited email & messaging support for follow-up.
We will schedule the calls in advance to make it easier for you to prepare and find a quiet spot so that you can devote your full attention.
A session usually runs between 30 and 45 minutes, although there will be no hard cut-off. If you miss a session due to sickness or business emergencies, it will be rescheduled to the next possible timeslot. Nothing is lost.
* Terms and conditions:
Prices excl. VAT and per month. Payable in advance. For the monthly and bi-weekly sessions, a 3 month minimum booking applies.
If you book for a full year in advance, you will get an additional month for free.
Architecture and workshops
This section is currently undergoing maintenance and will be back up soon. Stay tuned!