How we work

Hourly, transparent, and scoped by conversation

All work is hourly time & materials — project engagements or staff augmentation. No fixed-price packages, because honest database work does not know its ending in advance; no surprise invoices, because you see the hours as they accrue. Scope, staffing, and timeline are agreed in an initial conversation before any engagement starts.

Senior engineers, no bait-and-switch

The people who scope your engagement are the people who do the work. We staff engagements with named senior engineers who stay on your problem, learn your schema, and are accountable to you by name.

Read-only first

Engagements start from logs, Performance Schema, schema dumps, and monitoring — not from changes. We earn write access by demonstrating we understand your system, and production changes go through your review and your change process, every time.

Measurements, not adjectives

Every recommendation carries its expected impact, and every change we make is bracketed by before/after measurements — query digests, rows examined, lag, latency percentiles. "It feels faster" is not a deliverable; a number you can show your CTO is.

Rollback is part of the plan, not the apology

Migrations and cutovers are designed replication-first: build the target as a replica, parallel-run with reconciliation checks, cut over by promotion, and keep the old system warm until the new one has earned trust. The rollback path is rehearsed before it might be needed.

We leave your team stronger

Findings are walked through with your engineers at whatever depth they want. Runbooks, architecture notes, and the reasoning behind each decision stay with you. The goal of every engagement is that you need us for harder problems next time, not the same ones.

If that sounds like the way you want your database treated, start a conversation.