When the database is the problem, you want the person who has seen it before.
SQL Server consulting across the full lifecycle — production incidents, slow workloads, availability designs that have to hold, and migrations that cannot fail.
Written and run by Michael Paycer, a Senior SQL Server Database Administrator Consultant with more than 20 years hands-on across SQL Server 2000 through 2022, Azure SQL, and AWS RDS.
Root cause first. Then the fix.
Most SQL Server problems arrive described by their symptom — "the app is slow," "the job failed again," "we can't fail over." The symptom is rarely the cause, and a fix aimed at the symptom usually moves the problem somewhere else.
The work starts with measurement: wait statistics, execution plans, Query Store history, the error log, and the actual configuration of the instance. What comes back is a cause you can point at, an explanation of why it produces the behavior you're seeing, and a change list ordered by impact — including the items worth doing nothing about.
No offshore hand-off, no junior triage layer, and no recommendation to buy hardware before the workload has been read.
Five ways an engagement usually starts.
Scope follows the problem, not a package. Most work begins with one of these and stays as small as it can honestly be.
Performance tuning
Slow queries, blocking, runaway CPU, storage latency, tempdb contention, and plans that changed overnight. Diagnosed against a measured baseline so the improvement is a number, not an impression.
Covers execution plan analysis, wait statistics, indexing strategy, statistics and cardinality estimation, parameter sniffing, and workload-level review.
High availability & DR
Always On Availability Groups, Windows Failover Clustering, quorum and witness design, listeners, and recovery strategy that has actually been rehearsed against a stated RPO and RTO.
Migrations & upgrades
Version upgrades off legacy SQL Server, platform moves, and migrations to Azure SQL or AWS. Compatibility level and cardinality estimator changes tested before cutover, with a rollback that exists on paper first.
Remote DBA support
Backups and restore testing, monitoring, SQL Agent automation, patching, permissions, and the operational discipline that keeps an environment boring in the best sense of the word.
Health check
A structured audit of one instance or estate: configuration, backups, security, indexing, HA/DR readiness, and job health — returned as findings ranked by risk, with the reasoning attached.
Six stages, one continuous obligation.
A database that works today can still be difficult to maintain, impossible to recover, and expensive to scale tomorrow. These are the six stages where that difference is decided.
Plan
Requirements, architecture, sizing, security posture, recovery objectives, reporting needs, integration surface, and the maintainability constraints that decide what this system costs to own in year three.
Design
Schema modeling, normalization decisions and the deliberate exceptions to them, indexing strategy, naming standards, constraints and data integrity, and the application-facing contract the database is agreeing to honor.
Develop
T-SQL development, stored procedures, views, functions and triggers, SSIS packages, SSRS reports, SSAS models, and the data workflows that move information between systems without silently losing it.
Operate
Backups and verified restores, monitoring, SQL Agent jobs, Database Mail and alerting, index and statistics maintenance, patching cadence, and the periodic performance review that catches drift before it becomes an incident.
Protect
Least-privilege permissions, auditing, encryption planning, PCI-related controls, DoD STIG alignment, SOC 2 readiness, availability design, and disaster recovery that has been tested rather than documented.
Improve
Performance tuning, query optimization, execution plan and wait statistics analysis, index refinement, migration planning, platform modernization, and honest assessment of what is worth changing versus what is worth leaving alone.
Reference material, written to be used at 2am.
Long-form guides on the SQL Server problems that actually generate support calls — with the diagnostic queries, the interpretation, and the trade-offs of each fix.
How to read SQL Server wait statistics
What sys.dm_os_wait_stats is actually telling you, which waits are noise, how to separate signal wait from resource wait, and what each of the common wait types points at.
Parameter sniffing
Why the same procedure is fast for one customer and unusable for another — and which of the six fixes is right for your workload.
tempdb contention
File counts, PFS and GAM latch contention, the version store, and which of the old trace-flag advice is now the default.
Blocking vs deadlocks
Two different problems that get reported with the same words, and the queries that tell them apart in under a minute.
AG quorum & witness
Why an availability group that looks healthy still fails to fail over, and how node votes and witness choice decide that.
The full library
Eight long-form guides covering execution plans, index maintenance and statistics, backup and restore strategy, and the rest of what generates support calls.
Michael Paycer
A Senior SQL Server Database Administrator Consultant based in Saint Cloud, Minnesota, working across administration, development, performance tuning, database design, HA/DR, security, reporting, ETL, and cloud database environments.
Twenty years of production SQL Server, from 2000 through 2022, plus Azure SQL and AWS RDS — which mostly means having already been on the wrong end of most of the failure modes at least once.
Read the full background on the about page, or see the broader professional profile at michaelpaycer.com.
Describe the SQL Server problem you're facing.
The symptom, the environment, and what's at stake. The clearer the problem, the shorter the path to a cause — and the more honest the estimate of what fixing it takes.