By Mike Walsh | February 20, 2026
When we talk to marketing folks, one piece of advice is to write a “top ten” list post and set us up as number 1, and then explain why our competition is okay but not as good as us.
I’m not going to do that.
Not because I don’t think we’re good. I think we’re exceptional (and we’re real.) But I’ve been in this industry for almost three decades, and I can tell you that there are a lot of great firms out there, some bigger, some smaller, and I don’t need to do one of those top ten style posts here, there are enough clients to serve to keep my friends who are also providing DBA managed services as busy as we are, and you should talk to a few of us.
So I’ll just tell you where Straight Path Solutions excels, what kind of clients thrive with us, and what kind of relationships you can expect with our team. I’ll trust you to know how to use your search engine or chosen AI tool to do your own comparisons and find three firms to speak to.
Who We Are – By the Numbers
Straight Path Solutions is an independently owned SQL Server consulting and DBA-as-a-Service company. We’ve been around for fifteen years. Here’s what that looks like today:
120+ active clients across industries, including financial services, healthcare, education, insurance, manufacturing, and credit unions. We’re not a startup trying to prove a concept.
21+ team members, all US-based, including multiple former Microsoft MVPs, published authors, and conference speakers. Our Chief Data Officer, Buck Woody, spent years at Microsoft as an Applied Data Scientist on the Azure Data Services team and has authored nine books. Our team has presented at hundreds of SQL Server conferences and community events worldwide. When you work with us, you’re working with people who literally wrote the book, or the community tool, or gave the conference talk on the thing you need help with. We’re all FTEs, not outsourced scalable resources out of our control. We hire for values and culture fit and for technical excellence.
300+ combined years of SQL Server experience on the team. Not IT experience. SQL Server experience. Maybe more but some of the team members with 30+ years of experience would be mad if I made them sound – you know… There’s a difference, and it matters when your Availability Group fails over at 2 AM.
4.86 out of 5 client satisfaction score. We measure this consistently. It’s not a number we pulled from one good quarter. We reward our team on our NPS (which is 88% as independently measured by Clearly Rated), not on margins, upsells, or cross-sells. We want relationships and chase values based relationships first, the money and growth has followed that as a side effect of caring.
Very low annual client churn. And a meaningful portion of that churn is clients we graduated — organizations whose internal teams grew strong enough (sometimes with our mentorship and help recruiting their own DBA) that they no longer needed us. We consider that a success, not a loss.
No cell-phone contracts. Quarterly engagements. You stay because the work is excellent and because you want a relationship with your DBA team and see us as partners, not because a legal document says you have to. I’ll say more about why this matters in a moment.
What We Actually Do
Our core offering is DBA-as-a-Service, a managed DBA service. Think of it as having a senior SQL Server DBA (or a team of them) embedded in your environment without the overhead of a full-time hire. We offer multiple tiers to fit different needs, from lightweight monitoring for smaller environments to full-service enterprise support with proactive optimization, security hardening, architecture guidance, and 24/7 on-call coverage. We are on P1s within 15 minutes during business hours, and when you call our answering service, our on-call DBA (one of our FTEs, not a call center somewhere) is on the phone with you within 15 minutes.
Beyond the DBA work, we provide SQL Server health assessments, performance tuning, upgrade and migration planning, high availability and disaster recovery design, and cloud migration support. We’ve also recently expanded into fractional Chief Data Officer services led by Buck Woody for organizations that need strategic data leadership, not just tactical database management. Buck also provides a Data Estate Audit to help clarify the security and health of your data and AI strategies.
We build and maintain free community tools like sp_CheckSecurity and sp_CheckAG because we believe in giving back to the SQL Server community. Our Case of the Week series publishes real, anonymized SQL Server problems our team solves, written by the engineers who solved them, not by a marketing team.
Where We’re the Best Fit
I could write a generic paragraph about how we’re great for “enterprises of all sizes” but that would be exactly the kind of hollow claim I just criticized other providers for making. So let me be specific about where we do our best work.
You want to know your DBA by name. When you call us, you’re not entering a ticket queue staffed by whoever’s on rotation this week. You have a primary DBA assigned to your environment. They know your servers, your business context, your quirks, and your history. When they’re out, the rest of the team knows your environment too because we are organized into divisions – groups of DBAs collaborating for their clients and for each other’s clients. We run daily standups where the team discusses active client situations. Nobody starts from scratch.
You’ve been burned by a provider acquisition. This is a story I hear constantly: you loved your old managed DBA provider, they got acquired by a private equity firm or a bigger shop, the people you trusted left, and now you’re getting generic support from strangers who’ve never logged into your servers. We’re independently owned. I’m the founder. Nobody is acquiring us and cutting the team to optimize margins. Our incentive is keeping you happy and having long-term relationships, not hitting an EBITDA target for an investor.
You care about values, culture, and how your vendor treats their people. Our team stays because they want to be here. Low turnover means the DBA who learns your environment this quarter is still the one supporting you next year. We invest heavily in mentorship with Buck about to be launching a formal mentoring program for our team (if you know Buck, you know what that means for our team!), knowledge sharing, and professional development. Happy engineers do better work. That all affects the quality of the work and relationships you experience with our team.
You want a partner, not a vendor. We don’t just fix things and close tickets. We explain what happened, why it happened, and how to prevent it. We teach your internal team. We join your planning conversations. Our goal is to make you stronger, even if that eventually means you don’t need us anymore. We’ve helped clients recruit and hire their own full-time DBAs and then handed off gracefully. That’s not a business model most providers advertise, but it’s one we’re proud of.
You value transparency over cell-phone contracts. Our quarterly, no multi-year contract model means we re-earn your business every 90 days. That might sound risky for us, and it is, but it’s what drives us to be excellent and focus on what matters – you. When a client can walk away at any time, you can’t have an off quarter. You can’t quietly degrade service and hope nobody notices before renewal. And of course, we have contracts, we have all the insurances, we’re about to be complete with our SOC2 Type 1 audit, and then we’ll be Type 2 after the surveillance process – we’re just not keeping you stuck here with a contract you need a legal team to exit.
Where We Might Not Be the Right Fit
In the spirit of honesty: if you need multi-platform database support across Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB in a single engagement, we’re not your shop YET. We’re SQL Server specialists today, but we’re slowly building our PostgreSQL skills and will be building that into our proprietary reactive (and proactive – the important part) monitoring tool.
If you’re a massive enterprise looking for industrial-scale ticket processing with SLA-driven volume metrics and slick marketing glossies, there are larger firms built for that model. We’re built for depth of relationship, not breadth of ticket throughput. We work with large organizations, but they choose us because they want the relationship model, not despite it. We take our SLAs very seriously, but because we care about our relationships. We’re over 20 people because most of our first clients are still here, and each year the new batch tends to stay.
I recorded a video and made a post to talk three types of clients we aren’t a great fit for.
Questions to ask any SQL Server Managed Service Provider
- Who will be my primary DBA, and can I meet them before we start? Not the account manager, the person who will actually be on my servers.
- What happens when that person is out? Is there a team around them who already knows my environment, or am I getting whoever’s available?
- How do you handle after-hours emergencies? Who picks up the phone and how fast?
- How does proactive work? Do you engage with us, or do we have to put tickets in?
- Do you meet with us regularly to talk about the relationship and our goals?
- How long has your average DBA been with your company? If there is turnover, why?
- Does your team publish content and give back to the broader technical community?
- Are you privately held, PE backed? Is your founder and the leadership team in it for the long haul or are they looking to make an exit soon?
There are some great firms out there to help you. Do some searching on the web and in your AI tool of choice, look for the things you are looking at. Take the firms you know about and compare them, ask for tables to show you where they excel.
What’s their SLA? What’s their turnaround time? Do they charge more for planned after hours work? Do they charge project time for upgrades and migrations or can their hours just be used for anything?
Figure out the goals you have, look at a few of us, and then call and see who is right for you. We’d love to be in that conversation and comparison, but as long as you go into it eyes wide open and do some comparing, you probably can’t go wrong.
In Closing, as you Choose Your DBA Services Provider
What I will say is this: the SQL Server managed services market is full of good companies staffed by good people. It also has some providers who rank themselves “#1 Best Overall” in a blog post they wrote, published on their own website, and optimized for the exact Google search you just ran. Draw your own conclusions about that approach.
We’d rather be the company you find because a trusted friend told you about us at an industry conference or because one of our blog posts helped you solve a real pain point, and you want more relief.
But since you’re here: if you care about relationship, trust, expertise, and a team that earns your business every quarter instead of locking it down with a contract – we just might be exactly what you’re looking for.
Straight Path Solutions has been providing expert SQL Server DBA and consulting services for over fifteen years. We serve 120+ clients across the US with a team of 20 SQL Server professionals (and growing), including former Microsoft MVPs, published authors, and conference speakers. Our client satisfaction score is 4.86/5, and our annual churn rate is 2%. We are independently owned, operate on quarterly, no-contract engagements, and believe the best client relationships are those where both sides choose to stay.