Not every company that needs us for SQL Server consulting needs a full Remote DBA team with our managed DBA as a Service offering.
Sometimes just buying a bucket of hours makes more sense.
If you already have your SQL Server operations in-hand (good monitoring, a team that responds appropriately, after hours support, and you aren’t just relying on a single DBA who has to bring their laptop and phone on vacation) but you want some advice, tuning help, migration support you just don’t need an ongoing managed relationship.
If part of the problem is you don’t have someone watching, you don’t really own the alerts (or keep seeing the same ones over and over) and your coverage disappears when the DBA is on vacation, or out sick (or quits…) – then you probably need the Remote DBA offering.
One is buying “work” – the other is buying an ongoing relationship and comes with the break glass in case of emergency model already built in.
Short answer up front: Choose the bucket of hours approach when you have that coverage locked in place, you know you are covered day to day, and don’t need an SLA on that team’s response. You want some expertise to mentor, guide, help, or offload some work to a team of experts. Choose a Remote DBA team when you also want that monitoring coverage, a team that knows you and your environment and one that can proactively keep you out of most trouble but quickly respond with a 15-minute SLA when stuff goes bad.
This is part of our series of posts about Buying DBA Services. Trying to give a bit of a transparent look behind the scenes at where it makes sense to partner with a remote DBA shop like ours and where it may not.
What Do SQL Server Consulting Hours Cost?
At Straight Path we keep this pretty straight forward. After years of paying for projects and realizing that costs always change when scope creeps (and it always does) or unknown unknowns become known, I made the decision to keep it simple – we sell a bucket of hours with a pretty simple approach:
- You can buy them in 20 or 40 hour increments.
- A 20 hour bucket costs $7,000. As of 9/1/26, a 40-hour bucket will cost $12,000
- Effective hourly rate of $350/hr or $300/hr.
- Hours are good for a full year from the purchase of the bucket.
- Hours are billed in 15-minute increments
- Our full DBA team is available – the right skillset for the right problem, and that can change based on the needs of a specific project.
- No ongoing monitoring/DBA as a Service infrastructure like daily health checks/alert review/etc.
- SLA is typical next-business day (though we try and beat that).
The bucket of hours approach shines when the need is pretty clear or at least set within some boundaries:
- SQL Server upgrade/migration planning
- Cloud migration projects
- Performance troubleshooting
- Mentoring your existing DBA team
- Reviewing architecture and designs
- Assistance with a project
- Second opinions on a path forward
- Helping your existing DBA team get through a new skillset and learning.
- Azure architecture and CDO services with Buck and team.
Basically – buying a bucket of hours is not inferior to engaging with DBA as a Service. It’s the same team, the same skills, the same values. One is just better for certain situations.
What is a Remote DBA team?
An ongoing relationship where some team of DBAs becomes your DBA team. They take on defined and structured responsibilities usually. Some will bring a monitoring tool they lease or carefully built. Some will rely on a bunch of SQL agent jobs and custom alerts to let them know when you are in trouble and most have an SLA of some sort on when they’ll get back with you on an issue. Some have different SLAs and response times based on plans. Some charge per instance and some per hour.
At Straight Path we include things like:
- Monitoring with SQL Sentry and our proprietary Skopos DB monitoring tool that looks proactively and reactively at your server (We hate chasing the same problems over and over and simply reporting them. I talked about that in this post about clients who are a bad fit.)
- Daily health check e-mail that was human reviewed (without touching your hours for that review)
- Alert review and triage (again, without touching your hours until we connect and work with you)
- An established escalation and on-call process including our 15-minute P1 response.
- The relationship is really about the relationship and we lead each client relationship with a Lead DBA, not a sales person.
- Actual DBA work against the included hours.
You can see a lot more about DBA as a Service pricing on our DBA as a Services page itself or in this post about some common pricing questions.
What’s the Difference Between Remote DBA/Hours?
| Question | SQL Server Consulting | Remote DBA Team |
| Access to Senior SQL Server DBAs? | Yes | Yes |
| Can they do Troubleshooting and Projects? | Yes | Yes |
| Ongoing Monitoring? | No | Yes |
| Daily human reviewed health check? | No | Yes |
| Alert triage/response? | No | Yes |
| Access to on-call process? | No | Yes |
| Already familiar with your environment? | Depends on prior work and scope | Yes, by design |
| Proactive identification of issues? | Client initiated/based on the scope | Built-in |
| Best for occasional specialist needs? | Yes | Often overkill |
| Ongoing accountability? | Primarily on the client | Yes (monthly check-ins, escalations) |
| Best when DBA coverage is a need? | Usually not | Yes |
That table gets to the heart of it for the most part.
Why does a Remote DBA service cost more than the same number of hours?
It depends a bit on the bucket and the level of service. Some other recent posts get into the costs of the service and pricing more but we can look at an example.
A bucket of 40 hours goes for $12,000. If you buy Micro with an annual commitment, it costs $20,000 ($6,000/quarter when bought quarterly instead of annually). So that’s 40 hours for $12,000 or $20,000.
Why would anyone pay that extra $8,000?
Arguably, some companies just shouldn’t. If you need the work and not the relationship and DBA team that can flex up and down and respond? Buy the bucket – a bucket of hours is a bit easier to manage, requires less behind the scenes time that we choose to not bill separately for and we honestly make a bit more margin with the bucket of hours than DBA as a Service to be transparent.
The additional cost isn’t giving you more labor. That additional $667 a month is paying for all of the infrastructure and support built into the DBA as a Service offering. I got into those details a lot more already in the post about the value of hiring full-time vs bringing in a remote dba company on Tuesday. One point from that post worth mentioning here is that those costs are fixed and the bigger the plan you are on for DBA as a Service, the more the cost of those are absorbed into the relationship.
A quarter of Diamond, for instance, lists at $19,000 with 75 hours. 5 hours of overage at Diamond costs $1,250 so the quarter would have cost you $20,250 (though we often will let a client steal a couple or few hours of overage ahead at our Gold and Diamond levels if it’s unusual usage and the next quarter should be back to normal – we like to keep the billing as level as we can unless there is a genuine project need or big emergency). Two 40 hour buckets would get you 80 hours and cost you $24,000. Gold costs $14,000 for 45 hours, again a better option if you need that ongoing support. And clients often switch levels up and down based on forecasted need and we don’t keep people stuck on a contract – each quarter is earned or a client can leave without paying a big exit fee (I don’t love paying for the lawyers when we don’t need to.)
What happens during an emergency under each model?
With a bucket of hours – you have access to the consultants. Clients absolutely do engage with us when the server room is on fire and they need help now – but that’s a conversation at the sales call and if we have the capacity and availability we’ll do our best to support you. Our SLA, though, is still next business day response and if we have the capacity to get you back on the rails and you have hours remaining – we aren’t there for your next emergency in that same way as a DBA as a Service client has.
We can’t really guarantee emergency coverage or even give the bucket of hours clients access to call our on-call line and get the on-call DBA. Our managed DBA services clients are proactively managed with us. This means we know what your environment looks like. For most clients, we are owning and managing your backup and maintenance, we know it’s good because our tools tell us when it’s not. We are able to head off most disasters and we have your info in our systems when you call the on-call number at 2AM and our team on-call that week not only knows you, but knows the playbook you are managed by. We just can’t be as confident with success when you aren’t managed by us.
With DBA as a Service – you get the number, during the day, we may even call you and tell you you have an emergency and we are already in the teams call troubleshooting and we send you a link to join. We’re there for you and we are responding to your alerts and your calls and we’re with you until resolved.
Can you have an internal DBA team and still use a Remote DBA Team?
Absolutely. It happens more often than not. Hybrid patterns can look like:
- Vacation/Illness coverage
- Escalation path for a solo DBA
- A specialist with depth in areas the current DBA doesn’t yet possess
- Project help
- Coverage of alerts and after hours -so your DBA team can get a break on the alerts and after-hours
- A second set of eyes for a solo DBA
- A group of senior DBAs who teach the classes, speak at the conferences, etc for your existing DBA team
- Reducing the risk imposed by a single DBA who is the only one with all the details
More than a handful of our clients or more have existing DBA teams and it’s a great relationship. They learn and grow, we partner and aren’t there to replace them – in fact the way i describe our core value of humility to our team is “Let their team take the credit, we just want the bill paid…” Obviously, that’s partially joking – we pride ourselves on longstanding relationship with clients. That’s why our team has grown from just me steadily to 22 on the team. Clients tend to stay for a long time and we do pretty well on our annual NPS surveys that Clearly Rated runs for us. We’re in it for the success of their DBAs – because we’ve all been the full time DBA when the consultants were brought in – we get it.
Can you start with Remote DBA and move to just hours or vice versa?
Of course. Clients will sometimes move on that journey for various reasons.
A common one is we wind up identifying with our client that there is just an increasing amount of work and they’d be better served by having a DBA team and we can help them find a team, interview them and work to reduce our hours and increase their knowledge and maybe move to a backstop bucket of hours for that training, mentoring, and pinch coverage (we can’t do the ongoing DBA support after hours without monitoring – but we have made exceptions when a company was slowly transitioning to covering on their own..)
Quite often a client who buys a bucket of hours realizes that the findings we keep coming up with are real and they see the cobwebs that they just didn’t know existed until they told us to start looking. And it becomes apparent that they’ve gotten to where they are by one part luck and one part brute force and they want to start doing things right and want a DBA team supporting them without the cost of hiring two DBAs to really cover them and they move over to becoming a DBA as a Service client and we will roll their hours in and make sure they don’t lose them.
We purposefully don’t lock folks into anything here. The bucket expires after a year or when the hours are used. The DBA as a Service is an agreement that renews every quarter if we’ve earned it and someone can leave with a month notice.
How should you decide?
| If this sounds like you… | I’d start off considering… |
| “We know what needs doing; we occasionally need expert help doing it.” | Consulting hours |
| “We need help with a defined SQL Server project.” | Consulting hours |
| “Our internal DBA occasionally needs specialist backup.” | Consulting hours or hybrid |
| “Nobody is consistently watching SQL Server.” | Remote DBA |
| “We have monitoring but nobody really owns the alerts.” | Remote DBA |
| “Our one DBA is excellent, but everything depends on that person.” | Remote DBA / hybrid |
| “We want someone who knows the environment before an emergency.” | Remote DBA |
| “We have enough ongoing DBA work for a full-time person.” | Consider hiring a DBA and using us as a hybrid backstop for them to not be alone |
| “We’re not sure what condition the environment is in.” | Start with a Health Check (but be aware – that just reports the findings and gives you a plan – but it depends on you fixing the findings unless you buy a bucket. If you are buying the bucket anyway we can do the health check inside of the bucket and save that extra spend.) |
The goal isn’t to solve for the lowest “effective hourly rate” – there’s not that much difference at the end of the year. It’s to find out what problem you are trying to solve with outside help whether it’s Straight Path or another group.
At the end of the day… If you need occasional SQL Server expertise and don’t need that up-time chasing DBA team – maybe you need to buy a bucket of hours. If you want that team watching and supporting, it’s probably DBA as a Service.
And if you picked the “wrong” choice – have no fear with Straight Path at least, we’re a small company, I’m still the sales guy and “final arbiter” of sales-y and relationship decisions (though Evan and the team all agree on the values, it’s why the team keeps taking their 5-year sabbaticals and why some are nearing their second sabbatical already..) if we picked wrong, we’ll figure out the math on moving to the model you actually need. It’s just a lot easier to go into it knowing what you need up front.
Reach out and I’m happy to jump into a chat with you about your needs. I’ll not only tell you which of our options are best for you, I’ll tell you when we’re the wrong fit for you and when you just need to hire a team instead of going with consulting. Here’s some math to help on that decision even.