Long before I was the founder of a managed services company doing SQL Server work (back when I would have laughed at you if you told me I would ever had a team), I was a DBA, and sometimes I was the lone DBA at a company…
Having an amazing DBA, having reliable coverage, and having proper support are not the same thing.
Relying on one DBA creates a coverage gap because one person cannot provide 24/7 availability, deep expertise in every SQL Server discipline, and enough time for proactive maintenance. The solution is not necessarily replacing that DBA. It is giving them trained backup, documented access, clear escalation procedures, and a broader team behind them…
Prefer to watch? Catch my breakdown above, or read on for the details.
The “Math Problem” (And the Urgent vs. Important Trap of a Solo Prod DBA)
This isn’t about whether your DBA is committed. It doesn’t matter about their training. Most DBAs really care. We’re sort of a strange personality type that wants to own the world and fix everything. But it comes down to a simple math problem: Can one person realistically provide the coverage you need every hour of every day of every week of the year?
Spoiler: No… Heck No…. In spite of what some people think, DBAs actually like taking vacation sometimes, at least I’ve heard of those that do. And our families prefer we don’t take our phones and laptops to the beach. When that one person isn’t available, who has the access, the experience, and the context to step in and make a difference?
Even when they are at work, a strong DBA has specialties, and it can’t be in all areas. A performance tuning expert might not be the person who spends every day building DR architectures, planning cloud migrations, or handling SQL Server upgrades. (Just look at all the SQL Server 2016 instances still out there, completely end-of-life and unsupported. Some DBAs can stay at one job for ten years and still have never done a SQL Server upgrade.) That’s normal when a DBA isn’t deep in everything. And one person just can’t be.
The real danger is the “Urgent vs. Important” trap. The urgent work always wins. The meetings, the broken jobs, the daily fires. The dangerous part is the stuff we push to next week, next month, or next year (restore testing, documentation, patching, capacity planning, migrations, upgrades, stopping the drift and reducing the cloud costs…) The stuff that just gets left behind until that overwhelmed solo DBA eventually quits and the cycle continues for the replacement who comes in slaying dragons and bringing heroics eventually to find that they can’t get it all done either.
The “Quick Fixes” That Don’t Work
Companies try to solve this coverage gap in all sorts of ways. I’ve been on all sides of these methods, they don’t work:
- Knighting the Sysadmin: You point at a network admin, say, “You can spell SQL Server, therefore you are the backup DBA,” but then they never get the training to actually do the job safely (assuming they even get the time to actually do it – they won’t – they’re fighting their own urgent tasks, too.)
- Pretending Vendors Are DBAs: I’ve had uncomfortable calls with companies who say, “I thought our eDiscovery or ERP vendor was my DBA because their support team gives me so much advice.” No, they aren’t your DBA team, and you should have been taking backups, and now you have to talk to me because you’re not in a good state. I probably have at least 3 blog posts about those situations.
- Buying a Monitoring Tool: I love a good monitoring tool, but an alert is not a resolution. A tool can tell you something broke, but it can’t tell you the business impact is, the safest solution, or the historical context of why this server was configured that way. The DBA already knows there’s a problem. The monitoring tool just temporarily band-aids it by letting you turn the alert off until it comes back in a day or two.
The Real Cost and SLAs of DBA Coverage
When IT leaders finally realize they have a coverage gap, the conversation usually turns to cost, SLAs, and response times.
If you rely solely on one person, what is your actual SLA? It’s “whenever they wake up” or “whenever they get back to their desk.” If they are on vacation, your response time is practically nonexistent. What if they get sick? What if they decide they are done being the only DBA and join a bigger team?
You could hire two or three full-time DBAs to get true 24/7/365 coverage with guaranteed SLAs, but from a cost perspective, most companies can’t justify a massive payroll for a database team. You could buy an expensive monitoring tool, but as we established, you’re paying thousands of dollars for alerts, not fixes to watch your database estate.
Healthy coverage doesn’t mean replacing your DBA. It means putting a team behind them, around them. When you look at the “co-sourcing” of DBA as a Service, you are generally paying a fraction of the cost of a single full-time senior hire, but you get access to an entire bench of experts with guaranteed SLAs for response and resolution, and you aren’t paying them to be in meetings or sing happy birthday to Mimi in Accounts Payable.
Here is what that actually looks like when you compare the options:
| Coverage Feature | Internal Solo DBA | Monitoring Software | Co-Sourcing with DBA as a Service |
| 24/7/365 SLA Coverage | Not really (Needs sleep & vacation) | Yes (But only sends alerts) | Yes (With guaranteed response SLAs) |
| Context & Business Knowledge | High | None | Enough(Dedicated Lead DBA learns your environment and enough context to support you, but only what’s necessary.) |
| Broad Specialized Expertise | Limited to their specific background and chosen area of strength. | N/A | Yes (Access to Cloud, DR, and Tuning specialists. I think of our team as a the Highwaymen or your favorite supergroup – we each have our own strengths – together we have depth in a breadth of areas) |
| Proactive Maintenance | Often deferred for urgent daily fires, meetings, and distraction. | N/A | Yes (Capacity to do the grunt work & proactive planning, proven processes to find the most important proactive work to focus on – titrate to effect and budget.) |
| Cost Profile | Full Salary + Benefits + Burnout Risk | licensing fees without resolution | Predictable quarterly cost that can flex up and down as needed. (Fraction of a full-time hire) |
The One Question You Need to Ask
At the end of the day, you should ask your DBA this one question: When you’re not available (whether it’s planned or sudden), who can really take over your work?
If the answer is unclear, or they laugh and say, “Don’t worry, I’ll just take my laptop on vacation and not get sick,” that doesn’t mean you have a bad DBA. It means you have a critical coverage gap. And it probably means that person is going to leave at some point to go get some help or work somewhere they have a little more support (or join a team like ours – but we can’t hire them if we’re contracted to you – it’s in our agreement!)
If you’re a solo DBA and you’d like to have a team join you and help support you, or you want to help your DBA succeed and stay, our DBA as a Service offering may be just what you are looking for. All 22 of us here at Straight Path help companies solve this every single day. Reach out, and let’s get you some backup.