Consulting Services
SQL Server Consulting Services
TotalSQL specializes in SQL Server OLTP. With over 27 years of architecting, developing, tuning, documenting, and automating SQL Server solutions, there's very little in SQL Server OLTP I can't help with — but these are the areas I focus on most.
- Specialty
- SQL Server OLTP
- Experience
- 27+ years
- First consult
- Free
Resilience Keep data available, secure, and recoverable.
Business Continuity and Disaster Prevention
Backups are only as good as your last successful restore. I optimize backup, retention, and recovery strategies around your actual business needs, then automate regular restore-testing so you know — rather than hope — that you can recover. When something does go wrong, recovery is a rehearsed procedure instead of a crisis.
Ask about thisSQL Server High Availability
Availability Groups, Failover Cluster Instances, and Hypervisor defined redundancy each come with different trade-offs in cost, complexity (ownership), and licensing. I help you choose the right option for your business needs, budget, while balancing ownership concerns and costs. No more surprises: evaluate, scope, implement and FAILOVER without worries or unknowns.
Ask about thisSecurity, Auditing, and Ransomware Protection
While SQL Server ships secure-by-default - are you positive that it's correctly and securely configured for your environment right now? SQL Server Security encompasses many facets and factors - from workload-sensitivity, to hosting platforms and operating systems, on up to users, applications, and code. Get help securing, auditing, and protecting your data and infrastructure.
Ask about thisPerformance Make SQL Server scalable and fast — and keep it that way.
Workload Scalability and Optimization
When workloads grow faster than hardware budgets, the answer is usually smarter use of what you already have. I analyze how your workload really behaves — queries, indexes, concurrency, and I/O — and remove the bottlenecks that keep SQL Server from scaling before you throw more cores (and licenses) at the problem.
Ask about thisProactive Monitoring, Health Checks, and SQL Server Audits
A health check gives you a clear, prioritized picture of the configuration, maintenance, security, and performance risks across your SQL Servers. From there, proactive monitoring and alerting help catch problems — full disks, failing jobs, blocking, corruption — before your users do.
Ask about thisPerformance Tuning
Slow queries, scalability problems, blocking, and deadlocks: I find the root causes, not just symptoms. While index tuning and configuration optimization can play a big role in improving performance and scalability, true workload optimization frequently delves deeper by looking at data-storage (normalization + indexing structures), workload needs, and code.
Ask about thisOperations Monitoring, Maintenance, Server Health, and Day-to-Day Fine Print.
Remote DBA Services
Experienced DBA skill, experience, and judgement without a full-time hire: routine maintenance, monitoring, patching, capacity planning, and pro-active monitoring. Up-front we'll work on stabilizing your environment so that things don't go sideways; I also provide production support if needed. Engagements scale to the hours you actually need.
Ask about thisSQL Server Upgrades and Migrations
Moving to a newer version of SQL Server, new hardware, or the cloud provides a chance to address technical debt and address old problems. Done incorrectly, upgrades can also create new problems, result in cost-overruns and/or undue worry - or, conversely, result in ugly down-time and/or dissatisfied end-users. I plan, test, and execute upgrades and migrations with rollback plans and minimal downtime, including compatibility and performance testing up front.
Ask about thisLicensing Help
SQL Server licensing is complicated, and mistakes are expensive in both directions. Stop overpaying for SQL Server licenses while maintaining compliance. I help you understand editions, licensing-options and pricing (BYOL, SA, SPLA, Azure Arc), virtualization & cloud rules, as well as HA/DR rights — along with best-practices that help you right-size licensing costs without putting your workloads at risk of hitting scalability and performance bottlenecks.
Ask about thisPlatforms SQL Server wherever it runs: On-Prem or in the Cloud.
SQL Server Hosted by AWS (EC2 and RDS)
AWS provides a powerful and cost-effective environment for your SQL Server workloads - when implemented and managed correctly. In addition to hypervisor hosted SQL Server (via EC2 instances), AWS also provides options for fully-managed SQL Server (RDS). Each option comes with storage, performance, high availability, licensing, and ownership trade-offs. Get help choosing the right option for your business and workload.
Ask about thisHypervisor Hosted SQL Server
Virtualized SQL Server performs optimally when the host, storage, and guest are configured with SQL Server in mind — and poorly when they are not. I help your infrastructure teams review + tune vCPU, vNUMA, memory, and storage configurations so that your SQL Server VMs get the resources they actually need.
Ask about thisSQL Server Hosted in Azure
Azure offers several ways to run SQL Server — virtual machines, Azure SQL Database, and Azure SQL Managed Instance — each with different capabilities and costs. I help you choose the right fit, migrate safely, and configure for security, performance, availability, and predictable spend.
Ask about thisDevelopers & Partners Guidance, tooling, and help for hosting companies, vendors, and developers.
SQL Server Guidance and DBA Services for Hosting Companies
Hosting SQL Server for many customers brings its own challenges: density, isolation, patching at scale, and licensing. I provide guidance and DBA services that help hosting providers run multi-tenant SQL Server environments reliably and efficiently.
Ask about thisGuidance for ISPs and Software Vendors
If your product ships with — or depends on — SQL Server, database design, deployment, and upgrades affect every customer you have. I help vendors and service providers write efficient code, troubleshoot customer issues; and provide extensibility, optimization, tuning, and maintenance guidance that hold up in real customer environments.
Ask about thisDevelopment Best Practices
Many production problems start in development. I help organizations address their most common CI/CD failing: not pushing integration changes correctly into DEV SQL environments. I also help developers identify performance problems in dev/testing without forcing them to waste time with complex standards, expensive testing routines and other hurdles. I also help developers improve their architecture, coding, tuning, and diagnostics (or even DBA) skills.
Ask about thisCustomized Training and Instruction
Training tailored to your team, your environment, and your actual problems — from DBA fundamentals, to development and coding best-practices, performance tuning, reporting, and high availability. Delivered remotely as focused workshops or via ongoing mentoring.
Ask about thisGeneral SQL Server Consulting Services
Not seeing a match here for YOUR SQL Server problem or questions? If it involves SQL Server, I can help (even if the answer is to refer you elsewhere) — and initial consultations are always free, so it costs nothing to ask.
Ask about thisConsulting
Initial consultations are always free.
Bring your toughest SQL Server problem — performance, backups and restore-testing, auditing, encryption — and get an independent, experienced second set of eyes.