Stop dealing with database outages and slow queries. Red9 gives Arlington businesses direct access to senior DBAs who fix the bottlenecks and stop the outages. Only senior DBAs with 15+ years of experience. No juniors. SQL Server is all we do.
Talk to a senior DBA
A senior DBA reads this (not a sales rep) and replies within one business day. No obligation.
You see the findings and the price before you commit.
By clicking, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Notice.
Prefer to talk? A senior DBA is reachable at 1-877-891-1870
SQL Server consulting in Arlington: the short answer
Red9 runs senior-only SQL Server consulting, performance tuning, managed DBA services, and emergency response for organizations in Arlington and the surrounding mid-cities, including Grand Prairie, Euless, Bedford, Hurst, Kennedale, and Pantego. We have worked this one engine and nothing else since 2014. The free 145-point health check begins every engagement. There are 120+ clients on our books, from seed-stage startups up to the Fortune 100; Managed Services and Emergency Services clients get a production incident answered inside 15 minutes, and every change is measured on both sides.
Want a SQL Server consultant covering Arlington and the mid-cities? Book your free assessment.
Arlington can tell you months ahead which nights its systems will be pushed hardest. Two major-league venues, a theme park, an assembly plant, a health system head office, and one of the country's largest industrial districts share a few square miles.
AT&T Stadium, Globe Life Field, Six Flags Over Texas, and the venues between them fill this part of the city on a published schedule. Ticketing, access control, concessions, and parking go from idle to enormous inside an hour. We profile them under a real peak and fix the concurrency plans.
General Motors builds full-size SUVs at its Arlington assembly plant, with a supplier park around it and an industrial-equipment sector across Tarrant County. Plant databases are judged on whether the line keeps moving: case #1 below has the numbers.
The Great Southwest Industrial District sits on Arlington's eastern edge, minutes from DFW Airport, holding one of the largest warehouse concentrations in the country. Inventory platforms there run enormous counts of small statements. One export-count procedure ran 9,000 times a day: case #2 below.
A major North Texas health system runs its head office from Arlington, the University of Texas at Arlington sits next door, and insurance back offices fill the Metroplex. A reporting query fine at launch becomes a two-and-a-half-second wait once the table grows, with the readings in case #3 below.
We work with organizations across the mid-cities: Arlington, Grand Prairie, Euless, Bedford, Hurst, Kennedale, and Pantego, out to Irving, Duncanville, and Cedar Hill, and statewide across Texas, all over secure remote access. Windows get scheduled around your event and shift calendar on Central time.
Principal-grade judgment on an architecture, edition, or capacity call an Arlington team is about to commit to. 20 hours of argument beats a year of living with the wrong answer.
From $4,995 / 20-hr block (hours do not expire)Senior administrators taking the daily weight: alert triage, patching, restore verification, index and statistics work, and the failed jobs everyone has stopped noticing.
From $395 / moWhoever answers has handled this failure mode before, with a 15-minute response for Managed Services and Emergency Services clients.
From $2,500 / incidentWorkload ranked by daily cost, then covered, re-keyed, or rewritten. Blocking and deadlocks go on the same list, because concurrency problems have their own shape.
Version moves, Azure SQL, or AWS RDS, sequenced into your quiet weeks. Extended support for SQL Server 2016 stops on July 14, 2026, and 2017 on October 12, 2027.
145 read-only checks across configuration, backups, security, and query cost, returned in the order that pays best. The same audit runs on your own instance for free.
Failover proven under load rather than on a whiteboard. We design and tune clusters and Always On Availability Groups, then apply log shipping, replication, or Change Data Capture (CDC) where only the deltas need to travel.
Preparation on the databases your team wants an assistant reaching, ChatGPT (OpenAI) or Claude (Anthropic), together with the RAG pipelines, vector search, and analytical load those tools send at SQL Server. When reporting begins fighting transactions, we move the offload, SSRS and Power BI datasets included, onto Snowflake, Redshift, or whichever warehouse you already run.
"We engaged Red9 for senior SQL expertise to evaluate and fix the problem. Red9 did a deep performance assessment, identified that the problem was in the software implementation and what improvements were needed, implemented those improvements, and then measured and documented the difference in performance. Because of Red9, we were able to show our client the root cause of their problem and the quantifiable difference it made for their business after the problem was fixed."
"The breadth and depth of knowledge of the Microsoft SQL Database platform and ancillary technology stack that Red9 brought, has already yielded some very impressive results from both a physical and logical architecture perspective."
"Achieved results look amazing!"
Four stages, days rather than months, and the senior DBA who audits the estate is the one who changes it. You hold the ranked plan and its price before committing anything.
Which instances the business rides on, what the symptom feels like to the people using it, and when it started relative to the last deployment. That timing question does most of the work.
145 checks over instance configuration, whether the backups restore inside your target, where security stands exposed, and what each statement costs per day, ranked by payback. Want to see it first? The same read-only audit runs against your own instance at no cost through our self-serve Health Check.
A single session on the report, priority order, hours and cost beside every line. You finish holding a ranked plan and a fixed number.
Approved work gets done in plan order, with readings taken around each change so your engineers can confirm the gain. Managed services then keep the estate from drifting.
Three real Red9 projects, each followed from the first review through to the closing figure. Every number was recorded by the client, on both sides of the work. The names are held back at their request.
The problem. An industrial equipment manufacturer's main instance went past its own capacity line. SQL usage, the client's own capacity metric, jumped 62% month on month to 113.31%, past the line where demand outruns the instance. SQL errors rose 357% to 48,466, permission-denied failures were flooding one database, and blocking queries had turned into a storm rather than an incident.
What we did. We worked the surge instead of theorizing about it. 349 alerts came through that month, up 157%, and every one was handled: 326 P2 blocking-query alerts, along with high-CPU alerts and an SSL expiry warning that would have caused an outage of its own. Each blocking event was recorded with the statement behind it, so the tuning backlog came out of evidence rather than opinion, and the permission errors went to the team whose code was generating them.
Up 157% on the prior month, including an SSL expiry warning caught early.
The result. The manufacturer kept trading on a server that had run out of headroom, which was the objective that month. It also finished with a ranked tuning backlog built from 326 recorded blocking events and a clear separation between the faults that belonged to the database and the ones that belonged to the application.
What the month showed. On that metric anything above 100% means demand has outgrown the instance, and blocking is the usual first symptom: statements queue, waits compound, and the alert count climbs faster than the workload does. The 357% error rise was largely permission-denied noise from one database, which inflates the count without indicating a database fault.
How the month was worked (findings summarized, identifiers withheld):
-- Managed services month, SQL Server 2022 instance -- capacity : SQL usage 51.06% -> 113.31% (over the 100% line) -- P2 x326 : blocking queries; each captured with the offending statement -- P2 other : high CPU alerts; SSL expiry warning caught before it lapsed -- errors : 48,466 total, dominated by permission-denied in one database -- output : ranked tuning backlog + capacity case, evidence attached
Nothing here was fixed by tuning alone. The month bought time and produced the evidence for the capacity decision that followed.
The problem. A supply-chain software company had an export-count procedure executing about 9,000 times a day at 858 ms each. Every run scanned the same table for 16,614 reads. Nobody had complained about it, because under a second feels acceptable, and yet it was quietly holding more than two hours of SQL time a day.
What we did. We ranked the workload by total daily cost, which put this procedure near the top, then created a single-column index on the flag it filters. The before-and-after tables came out of the client's performance comparison report.
A 5,538-fold drop from one index on one column.
The result. The procedure now returns in a millisecond and reads three pages. Two hours of daily SQL time went back to the platform, and none of it needed new hardware or a code change.
What the review found. The procedure counted rows by an exported flag on a table with no index on that column, so all 9,000 daily executions scanned it. The result set was tiny; the work to get there was not.
What we changed (identifiers generalized for privacy):
-- Export-count procedure: ~9,000x/day, 858 ms avg, 16,614 reads/run. CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX IX_RED9_ExportCounts__Exported ON dbo.[ExportCounts] (exported); -- rollback: DROP INDEX IX_RED9_ExportCounts__Exported provided
One column, one index. Duration 858 ms to 1 ms, CPU 359 ms to 1 ms, reads 16,614 to 3.
The problem. An investment management firm ran a SELECT DISTINCT against an economic-rates table roughly 220 times a day. Each execution averaged 2,604 ms, burned 1,781 ms of CPU, and read 29,919 pages, which added up to about nine and a half minutes of SQL time and 6.6 million pages read a day for a list of distinct values.
What we did. For this DISTINCT query a covering index did the work, because the engine can walk the index in order and skip duplicates instead of sorting a heap of rows. We created a covering nonclustered index keyed on the filtered column with the selected column included, and took the readings from the same comparison run.
26 times fewer pages, with the duplicate sort gone entirely.
The result. A query the reporting layer calls all day now answers in 8 milliseconds instead of two and a half seconds, on 223 times less processor time per run and a twenty-sixth of the reads.
What the review found. The DISTINCT had no supporting index, so the plan scanned the rates table and then sorted to remove duplicates. Sorting is what made it expensive; the row count involved was modest.
What we changed (identifiers generalized for privacy):
-- SELECT DISTINCT on a rates table: ~220x/day, 2,604 ms avg, 29,919 reads. CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX IX_ECON_RATES_VAL_MISC1 ON dbo.[ECON_RATES] (val) INCLUDE (misc1); -- rollback: DROP INDEX IX_ECON_RATES_VAL_MISC1 provided
Ordered index access removed the sort. Duration 2,604 ms to 8 ms, CPU 1,781 ms to 8 ms, reads 29,919 to 1,141.
All three of those estates belong to somebody else. 30 minutes is enough to read yours.
Get a Free SQL Server Assessment ➜Rather talk it through? A senior DBA answers at 1-877-891-1870.
15 years or more behind whoever holds your credentials, and the same person from audit to fix.
This engine and nothing beside it since 2014, over 10,000+ audited databases.
Duration, reads, and CPU on both sides of every change, in Query Store and DMVs you can read yourself.
Game night or public holiday, Managed Services and Emergency Services clients reach a senior DBA within 15 minutes.
No, and virtually every client we have works this way, in Arlington and everywhere else. A senior DBA stays reachable through your full Arlington workday on Central time, with 24/7/365 emergency cover on top for Managed Services and Emergency Services clients. Control of access never leaves you: we connect over your VPN or bastion host on least-privilege logins you create and can withdraw instantly, with additional controls above that, and each change arrives as a script your engineers review before it runs.
How the three options behave on the night an Arlington production database gives out mid-event.
| Red9 | In-house DBA hire | Generalist IT / MSP | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seniority | Principal-grade SQL Server specialists averaging 15+ years, with no junior layer underneath. | One hire owns every instance, and two employers either side of them are bidding. | Generalists who visit SQL Server between other platforms. |
| SQL Server focus | SQL Server is all we do. | Split across whatever else the job absorbs. | A single line on a wide service catalog. |
| Emergency response | Staffed at every hour of the year, with a 15-minute response for Managed Services and Emergency Services clients. | Whatever one person covers outside sleep and vacation. | A queue measured in hours, more on a weekend. |
| Proof | Readings taken around each change that your own engineers can rerun. | Seldom recorded anywhere durable. | Reported in prose rather than numbers. |
| Cost model | By project, by month, or by incident, with nothing on payroll between problems. | A loaded Metroplex salary of roughly $145,000 to $170,000, plus benefits and the vacancy first. | Buried in a larger invoice where the database share is invisible. |
| Ramp-up | On your plans within days. | Months of search in a competitive market, then a ramp. | Slow to start, with the background re-explained each ticket. |
Senior SQL Server cover can be in place before your next peak week. Get a Free SQL Server Assessment ➜
Founder & Partner
25+ years making SQL Servers faster.
Chief Operating Officer
Chief Revenue Officer
Working beneath them is a senior-only DBA bench averaging 15+ years, and one named lead stays accountable for your result throughout.
We support Arlington-area teams over secure remote access, across the city, Grand Prairie, Euless, Bedford, Hurst, and Kennedale. The same senior DBA answers whether the instance sits in the entertainment district, on an assembly line, or in a Great Southwest warehouse.
Coverage runs across the mid-cities and the rest of Texas. Explore the areas we serve.
Five questions that separate a serious SQL Server specialist from a polished generalist.
Ask what share of their billed hours goes into SQL Server. Nobody gets fluent in an engine they visit occasionally.
Name and years for whoever will hold the credentials, written down, and confirmation it stays that person.
A plan that behaves on a quiet morning can collapse at peak. Ask how they profile a workload during its busiest window.
Response time and eligibility, in the contract, as numbers a lawyer could read.
Some servers are simply out of headroom. A consultant who only ever sells tuning will keep tuning past the point it helps.
| Headquarters | Alpharetta, GA (Atlanta metro) |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2014 |
| Focus | Microsoft SQL Server only |
| Team | Senior-only DBAs, 15+ years average experience |
| Clients | 120+, from startups to the Fortune 100 |
| Databases audited | 10,000+ |
| Rating | 4.9 out of 5, 120+ reviews |
| Emergency response | 15 minutes, 24/7/365, for Managed Services and Emergency Services clients |
| Engagement models | Scoped project, monthly retainer, or per-incident |
| Service area | Arlington, Grand Prairie, and the Metroplex mid-cities, plus nationwide via secure remote access |
Yes. Red9 covers Arlington and the middle of the Metroplex, out through Grand Prairie, Euless, Bedford, Hurst, Kennedale, and Pantego, and one senior SQL Server consultant stays with the account. Remote is what almost every client of ours uses, and on a stadium event day it steps around the traffic that closes this part of Tarrant County to anybody driving in. A 15-minute emergency response comes with Managed Services and Emergency Services cover on top of that.
15 minutes, any hour, any day of the year, and a senior DBA answers instead of a ticket queue. This response-time SLA is available to current Managed Services clients and Emergency Services clients. See Emergency Services ➜
The free 145-point health check comes first, which is what turns the quote afterwards into arithmetic instead of a guess. Managed services and remote DBA start at $395/mo, a 20-hour senior DBA block is $4,995 and the hours do not expire, and 24/7 emergency response opens at $2,500 per incident. Against a loaded Metroplex DBA salary of $145,000 to $170,000, laid out in the comparison above, one month of retainer costs about four percent of a month of that hire. Larger scopes are priced once the check is in.
You tune for the peak and schedule for the trough, and the calendar makes both easy here. We profile the workload during a real event window rather than a Tuesday morning, because the plans that fall over under concurrency look perfectly healthy when the building is empty. Then maintenance, index rebuilds, and statistics updates go into the quiet days, and we pre-warm what the peak will need. A capacity ceiling found in August is far cheaper than one found in October.
It can be the biggest one on the server. Under a second sounds fine until you multiply it: 858 milliseconds across 9,000 runs is over two hours of SQL time every day, spent by a procedure nobody has ever reported. We rank statements by daily total rather than worst case, which is how this sort of thing surfaces. That one, in case #2 above, dropped to 1 ms with a single-column index, and its reads went from 16,614 to 3.
Stabilize first, then fix causes. Week one is about keeping the estate serving: we take the blocking alerts as they come, kill and record the worst offenders, clear the errors that are noise, and separate the faults that belong to the application from the ones that belong to the database. Only then do we tune, because tuning a saturated server while it is falling over teaches you nothing. We have carried an estate through a month at 113% SQL usage and 326 blocking alerts doing exactly that, described in case #1 above.
Yes. Arlington nonprofits and government agencies get the free 145-point health check on identical terms, and 145 findings come back ordered by risk with a price against each, written plainly enough for a board or a city council packet. Managed services and remote DBA run from $395/mo. A 20-hour senior block is $4,995 and the hours do not expire.
Which versions and cloud platforms we support, and how a standard engagement is put together, are covered on our SQL Server consulting page.
Half an hour is enough to show where your SQL Server loses speed, uptime, and money, and what getting each one back involves. The free SQL Server assessment puts the findings and the figure in front of you first, with nothing owed.
Schedule My Call Now ➜Rather talk it through? A senior DBA answers at 1-877-891-1870.
