“Everything is negotiable. Whether or not the negotiation is easy is another thing.”
— Carrie Fisher
We offer the following services:
Consulting – Telling it like it is. We come in (onsite* or virtually) and work through your pain points with your team. We will make recommendations in a semi-formal document and thank you for your business. It is up to you to decide when and if you implement these recommendations. If you want us to do the implementation, please see the Contracting section below. Our typical Consulting engagements are around best practices, HA/DR, upgrades, migrations and performance tuning.
- Daily – $1750/day
- Weekly – $7500/wk, 2 weeks typical max.
- * You pay actual travel if not within 50 miles of North Dallas.
Contracting – making it happen. This can be an extension of the Consulting above, or we can fill a seat left vacant for whatever reason. Generally 3 – 6 months. For onsite, this is a 40hr/wk agreement.
- Sr. level DBAs – $150-$200/hr. Everything in life is negotiable, but true Senior DBAs are efficient and may actually wind up costing you less than a Mid-level person. Seniors have 10+ years of verifiable experience.
- Mid-level DBAs will generally be around $100/hr.
- Junior DBAs are $50-75/hr depending on the need and who is available.
Remote DBA – only pay for what you need. We set up a maintenance agreement to remotely check in on your servers and perform routine maintenance/problem resolution. If desired, we will respond to alerts and outages 24×7. Minimum ‘X’ hours per week the typical arrangement to get the off-hours/on-call support.
- Negotiable similar to above, but remote workers tend to charge a bit less to not have to leave their home IT cave.
- You will be assigned a Primary DBA. Possibly a Secondary as well, depending on the minimum hours agreed to.
SQL Server HealthCheck
- Your car needs oil changes. Your Body needs regular physicals. Your SQL Servers need periodic HealthChecks
- We run a series of non-invasive scripts, analyze the results and go through the results with you.
- 2-3 hours per instance, does not include implementing our recommendations
Training – We teach basics classes to non-DBAs. If you don’t have a DBA and your Developers or Network guys are filling in we can help. These are done onsite, class limit of 4 is ideal. Highly interactive with lots of hands on. Not all topics are available.
- “It depends” – lets talk about what you need. Pre-written webinar is significantly cheaper than custom on-site.
Candidate Screening – We will pre-screen your SQL Server DBA candidates for you if you don’t have an experienced person to do this. SQL Server DBA and Architect only, not development, SSRS or DW/BI. It takes about 45-60 minutes and we will send you a scorecard (1-5) and comments on the top 5 topics your client actually requires. We typically do these in the evening, so that the candidate is relaxed and not hiding from her boss or peers.
- $100 for one, less for multiples. Please don’t ask us to screen 20 candidates.
Short-term, one-time help:
- If you only need a half or full day of help fixing things that doesn’t fall into the Consulting daily rate above we can make it happen.
- Payment of at least 50% before, and the balance Net 10. Sadly, we’ve been burned on this and need to mitigate that risk for our team.
“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” – Mike Tyson
Read more about why your DR plan might be about to punch you in the mouth HERE