SQL Server Consulting

Why Use a SQL Server Consultant?

When you need experts who can solve the challenge, teach your team or become a long-term team member, why not look to SQL Server experts like the team at Straight Path for SQL Server consulting help? We’ve been there, done that, and have probably been in your spot before. From our SQL Server Health Checks to our SQL Server DBA-as-a-Service managed service engagements, we will become a mentor and coach to your team and bring your SQL Server environment to the next level.

Straight Path Solutions is a team of  SQL Server consulting professionals working together to help our clients, primarily in the “Relational Engine” space. If a DBA, performance tuner, or data architect touches it, it’s probably in our wheelhouse, and one of our experts can help bring you peace of mind with our SQL Server consulting services. We also do much consulting with Azure SQL Database, Azure Managed Instances, AWS RDS for SQL Server, and Both Azure/AWS Infrastructure as a Service.

Our SQL Server consultants speak at the conferences, write the blog posts, answer the forum questions, and with our DBA as a Service practice – we get to see all sorts of interesting challenges. To the point that when we start a SQL Server consulting engagement, we’re often already working on the culprits and possible solutions while we’re on that initial call.

We can help you offload your DBA team’s work. We can augment your existing staff with our Senior DBA as a Service solution. We will share our knowledge as we go. We can come in fast and in “emergency mode” to tune those stubborn queries or apps. With our SQL Server upgrade services, we can finally get you far away from those stubborn SQL Server 2012,2014, and even 2016 – and off of the aging Windows Operating Systems we often encounter on health checks and intake calls.

Not Just SQL Server Consulting…

Straight Path’s SQL Server consultants become a force multiplier for your team. But more than that, we become a part of your team, and you become a part of our Straight Path team.

Mike Walsh is the founder and principal consultant and has been working exclusively with SQL Server for about 25 years, the last 12 years as a SQL Server consultant, managing director, and practice lead. He is a SQL Server blogger and speaker and was recognized by Microsoft as an SQL Server MVP nine times from April 2011 until 2020.  His experience, knowledge, and expertise will quickly help you and your team find the right way to SQL Server peace of mind.

The team of consultants and DBAs at Straight Path is like him in many ways. SQL Server experts. Often MVPs. Authors, bloggers, speakers, and experts in their field. Straight Path doesn’t just look to someone’s technical skills before putting them on a project; we want to make sure they have the people skills, are the right fit for the client, and give you the best experience possible. We partner with our clients and want to help you get past whatever brought you to us, and we want to leave you with our knowledge and the tools to help solve your problems moving forward. We do SQL Server consulting with a client-first focus. Read about our great team of SQL Server Consultants here.

SQL Server Consulting Services

Just a highlight of some of the more common SQL Server consulting services we provide at Straight Path:

• SQL Server Consulting – Are you in pain right now? Do you need us to come in, assess your struggles, quickly create a prescription, and help you on your way? While we love our long-term DBA as a Service relationships, we’re also really good at stopping your pain right now.
• SQL Server Upgrades– Expert, painless, set-it-and-forget-it upgrades. Our expertise, experience, and methods will get you there with little disruption to your users. We’ll get it right the first time, and your team will learn about the new features. Upgrading SQL Servers is something we know well, we speak on it and, let’s face it, it’s time!
• SQL Server Health Assessments – A comprehensive way to give you peace of mind that your SQL Server infrastructure is built and performing right. If there are gaps? Our goal is to mentor and help you get past them and keep that knowledge in house moving forward.
• SQL Server Remote DBA – Managed Services – Whether you need a Sr. DBA mentoring your existing DBAs or team on a timeshare approach team-based based delivery so there are no vacation or sick time losses or you need a 24*7 keep the lights on DBA, Straight Path has the right answers for you. We can scale up fast for emergency triage and ER style care, then settle down to a small, affordable commitment to help keep your SQL Server world running smoothly after we fix what’s broke!
• Data Warehousing – The extended family of Straight Path Solution includes some serious expertise in the realm of Data Warehouse Architecture and Data Integration services. Just like our relational engine consultants, this team consists of top-level talent. SQL Server MVPs, speakers, authors, and bloggers who specialize in making the most of data warehousing.
• SQL Server Performance Tuning – Our approach is to start with the easy to fix and big gains, then to drill in deeper to the more time consuming to fix. Often we can stop on the outside layers and leave an environment in a great spot. Sometimes you’ll need to dig deeper, but we’ve bought you time by doing the easier, less risky fixes.
• SQL Server Database Design and Development – Hiring SQL Server consultants who have helped many environments recover from bad decisions can help you avoid those at the beginning of your next project. We’ve seen a lot of mistakes and want to help you avoid them.
• SQL Server Virtualization Consulting – Going virtual? Currently Virtual? We can help make sure you are following all of the necessary best practices, making sure your environment is properly configured, and provide guidance on architecture for the best SQL Server performance in a virtual environment. From the disks to the switches to the hosts to the VMWare or Hyper-V settings. This goes for cloud-based SQL Server deployments. Whether it’s AWS EC2 or Windows Azure, or the Platform as a Service options like RDS or Azure SQL databases, we can help make sure you’re set up for success.
• SQL Server High Availability Consulting- Availability Groups, VMWare DRS, Zerto, Failover Cluster Instances, VMWare HA, Failover to the cloud, active secondaries, etc. So many choices. Let us work with your team, assess your needs, and help you solve for your business and your budget.
• Contact Us today for your specific challenges and needs

Hiring The Right SQL Server Consulting Firm

When looking for a SQL Server consulting firm to guide your team, you want to see your needs met quickly and efficiently. You want to see your team being mentored and know you got the best value possible. You want the skills to stay with your team at the end, you don’t need someone’s foot in the door while a consulting firm tries to multiply. The typical consulting engagement for us has no fixed length of time, but our goal is always to make the need for us to decrease as soon as possible when a client agrees to that. Whether that is quickly building in efficiency and automation of routine processes or sharing in-depth knowledge with your team, we want you to succeed, and we are honored to be a part of that, but we never want to stay just to stay and bill.

We also have a commitment to quality and excellence. We pride ourselves on trying to live by the principle that each time we talk with a client, it should be as good or better for the client as it is for us. To that end, you can always reach out to our founder and company owner, Mike Walsh, on his cell – 603.203.9797 anytime. That’s a commitment to our quality and to the transparency we have with our clients.