Senior database administration, delivered as an ongoing service or as a defined project. Performance tuning, indexing strategy, query optimisation, capacity planning, access-control hardening, patching and version upgrades.
Most mid-sized institutions do not have a full-time senior DBA, and do not need one. What they need is someone accountable for the database being fast, patched, and correctly permissioned — and available when something is wrong. That is what this is.
Who it’s for
Organisations that depend on their databases but have no in-house senior DBA.
- Banks and financial institutions where the database is the system of record
- IT departments whose database work currently falls to whoever is least busy
- Organisations running production databases that have never had a formal health review
- Teams facing a version end-of-life and unsure how to plan the upgrade
What we deliver
Accountability for the health of your databases, with the evidence to show it.
Health assessment
A documented review of configuration, performance, security posture and patch level, with prioritised findings.
Performance tuning
Query and index optimisation, configuration tuning against your actual workload, and removal of the pathological queries every estate accumulates.
Capacity planning
Growth trending for storage, connections and throughput, so procurement is planned rather than reactive.
Access control hardening
Role and privilege review, removal of shared and orphaned accounts, least-privilege enforcement.
Patching and upgrades
Planned patch cycles and major-version upgrades with tested rollback.
Standards and runbooks
Documented operating procedures so routine work does not depend on one person.
Ongoing administration
Retained DBA capacity on an agreed response commitment.
Platforms and versions we support
We work across the three engine families most common in this region, including mixed estates where different applications brought different databases with them.
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
- MariaDB
- Microsoft SQL Server
On-premises versus cloud
Every criterion below is one your auditors will ask about. This is why we deploy inside your network by default.
| Criterion | On-premises, on your infrastructure | Public cloud / SaaS |
|---|---|---|
| Security | You control the firewall, the encryption keys, the access policy and the audit trail. | Shared infrastructure and a provider-defined security boundary. |
| Privacy | Data never leaves your network perimeter. | Data is stored and processed on third-party systems under their terms. |
| Autonomy | Full customisation, your upgrade schedule, no vendor lock-in. | Provider-driven roadmap and forced upgrade windows. |
| Integrity | You define backup, retention and recovery, and you test them. | You inherit the provider’s backup policy and their definition of acceptable loss. |
| Continuity | Service survives loss of internet connectivity; it runs on your intranet. | An outage or a commercial dispute at the provider becomes your outage. |
| Cost | Capital cost plus support; no per-seat escalation as headcount grows. | Per-user subscription that grows with your organisation. |
How it connects to the rest of your stack
Nothing we deploy is meant to stand alone. These are the joins we build as part of the same engagement.
- Monitoring — Database health is monitored continuously — replication lag, connection saturation, slow queries and disk headroom — not inspected occasionally.
- Asset management — Database servers and their licences are tracked as assets, which matters particularly where per-core licensing costs are involved.
- Project governance — Upgrades and consolidation work are run as governed projects with defined stage gates rather than as open-ended effort.
Engagement summary
The engines we work with
Illustrative diagrams of the database engines and guarantees this service is built around.