DB-Staff's Remote DBA services for Microsoft SQL Server are performed by only MCITP DBAs and  MCITP DBAs 2008 with more than 5 years experience in SQL Server administration and development. Our prices are lowest in the industry because the main DB-Staff office is located in Kiev, Ukraine which is offshore zone for many outsourcing companies. We also have consultants in China, Russia, US, England, Norway etc.

The first week of our SQL Server DBA services is absolutely free. During this week we obtain access, configure monitoring on the servers, prepare documentation about the servers and databases, discuss SLAs, Statement of Work (if any) and the work plan for the first month of dba service.

Our sql server dba services consist of reactive and proactive activities. Reactive dba service is mainly Incident and Problem Management which means the operational work that needs to be done ASAP and is somehow related to unplanned downtime resolving of the entire service (in the meaning service is access to the sql server databases) or some of its parts. The proactive dba service is supposed to decrease the probability of downtime and performance issues by optimization, workload analysis, maintenance etc.

Remote DBA SLA plans

SLA (Service level agreement) plan dictates such critical parameters of our dba service as service time and maximum response time. The service time is actually the time when our remote dba service is available for instance Mon-Fri 08-18 GMT, within this time all customer's requests are performed according to the max response times. Response time is the time between instant when the customer e-mailed or called us (all 1st priority cases must be followed with a phone call) or monitoring system generated an alert and the instant when we actually started to work on it. This does not necessarily mean that if your SLA plan declares 30 minutes maximum response time on the priority 1 incidents then you will always need to wait this 30 minutes. Response time can still be 3 minutes. We just reserve this time in case we are busy. If we brake SLA we assume penalties that are defined according to the customers business in the end of negotiation process. The resolution time of the cases is always assumed to be as soon as humanly possible.

Platinum SLA plan

Service time - 24x7

Gold SLA plan

Service time 8:00-20:00 GMT every day (Mon-Sun)

Silver SLA plan

Service time 8:00-20:00 GMT Mon-Fri

The priority of a case is calculated according to the ITIL table depending on urgency and impact.

 The case priority numbers mean

1- critical
2- high
3- medium
4- low
5- planning

These SLA plans are basic and can always be adjusted according to the customer's business needs. If customer's remote dba service level agreement defines service time for instance 8-20 GMT Mon-Fri (Silver plan) and the customer needs some dba work to be done out of her service time for instance at 15:00 on Sunday she will be billed for extra money according to the next dba service extra time rates:

20:00-23:OO, 6:00-8:OO GMT Mon-Fri and 6:00-23:00 GMT Sat-Sun  - $15 per hour

23:OO-6:00 GMT Mon-Sun  - $20 per hour

Proactive DBA service

Every day we check health of customer's production servers. Weekly we check performance counters and dynamic management views. Monthly we send to customers performance analysis reports with improvement proposals and plan of work for the next month. Proactive activity of remote dba work includes

• database maintenance (plans creation, checks)
• database workload analysis
• performance counters analysis
• configuration optimization
• sql code optimization

Customer database administration orders

The work that customer orders to be performed. It can be but is not limited to

• backup/restore
• database migration
• sql reports writing
• installation of new sql server instance
• upgrade to a new version of sql server
• t-sql code review
• database design and design review
• participation in development

Prices of remote DBA services for MS SQL Server

Small business

Database farm of up to 10 sql server instances with multiple databases on each instance and the total databases' size is up to 1 TB. No much usage of business intelligence (several Analysis/Reporting servers).

Sillver SLA plan COST $500 per month

Gold SLA plan cost $750 per month

Platinum SLA plan price $1000 per month

Medium business

Database farm of up to 25 instances, multiple instances of reporting and analysis services, wide usage of SSIS, usage of failover solutions.

DBA service prices $1500-$3500 depending on SLA

Corporation

25+ sql server instances, many of them are clustered, multiple dedicated analysis and reporting servers,500GB+ data warehouses,200+ total database quantity.

Contact us to get draft price estimation for your corporation dba service plan according to the description of  your database farm and your dba service needs.

 Remote DBA service price per SQL Server instance

The customer can choose to be billed for each sql server instance separately in this case our remote dba services monthly rates are $200 per production stand-alone servers, $300 per production sql server clustered instance and $100 per test/dev instance. No difference in price between Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 version but the prices for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 are a bit higher because of the lack of qualified specialists and current version bugs that add much of workload. 

If interested in our database administration services contact our chief DBA Vadym Shotov

 ICQ 451-452-860

e-mail \n This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

cell phone +380987634447 (call anytime for dba consultation)

Or use our Contacts form. Be sure you will receive exhaustive answers to all your questions within half a hour.