Queries dragging, a backup nobody has restored in a year, a license renewal that keeps climbing? Red9 puts senior-only DBAs behind Austin-area teams, isolates what is really wrong, and proves each fix with before-and-after numbers you can rerun yourself. SQL Server is all we do.
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SQL Server consulting in Austin: the short answer
Red9 runs senior-only SQL Server consulting, performance tuning, managed DBA services, and emergency response for companies across Central Texas, from downtown and the tech corridor out to Round Rock, Cedar Park, and Georgetown. SQL Server is the whole of what we do here, and a free 145-point health check kicks off every engagement. Our books hold 120+ clients, from first-round startups to the Fortune 100; for Managed Services and Emergency Services clients a production incident gets a senior DBA inside 15 minutes, and each fix leaves with numbers taken before and after the work.
Want a SQL Server consultant close to home in Austin? Book your free assessment.
Austin grew up on software, silicon, and public institutions, and every one of them leans hard on SQL Server. Product databases at the tech firms, fab and supply data at the chip makers, records systems in state government and higher ed, and clinical data across the hospital networks all suffer the moment an instance starts to lag. Those are the systems our DBAs spend their days working on.
Austin earned the Silicon Hills name for a reason. Oracle runs its headquarters on the lake, Tesla builds from its Austin headquarters, Dell anchors nearby Round Rock, and Google, Apple, and Meta all hold large campuses in town. Product and SaaS databases all over that scene scale in a hurry and punish anything sized for last quarter, with payment paths held to PCI-DSS. We size and tune SQL Server so it keeps pace as usage climbs, on premises, on Azure, or on AWS.
Chip making is a pillar of the local economy. Samsung runs a major fab in Austin with a second rising in Taylor, and NXP Semiconductors and Applied Materials both operate here. Manufacturing, yield, and test data pours in around the clock, so we tune the high-volume databases that carry exactly that kind of manufacturing load, holding throughput steady when a run floods the system. We have fixed exactly this reliability problem for an industrial manufacturer: see the case study below.
Austin is the capital of Texas, so state agencies run public records, licensing, and benefits data across the city, and the University of Texas at Austin operates one of the largest research and enrollment estates in the state, with student data under FERPA. Systems like these answer to the public and cannot stall at a filing deadline or during registration. Public-sector estates lean on SQL Server heavily, and we keep those backends fast and the reporting honest.
The metro carries a deep healthcare economy. Ascension Seton and St. David's HealthCare both run large hospital networks across Central Texas, moving clinical and claims data under HIPAA where a slow query turns into a bedside delay. We speed up the clinical and reporting databases behind that care while access stays locked down and audited. We have done exactly this for a physician-owned medical group: see the case study below.
We support businesses across Central Texas: Austin, Round Rock, Cedar Park, Georgetown, Pflugerville, San Marcos, Kyle, and Leander, and statewide across Texas, including Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio, over secure remote access. Work runs on your schedule, during Central business hours.
Principal-level input for an Austin team sitting on a decision about architecture, performance, cost, or how far the system has to scale. We come in while the call is still cheap to get right, ahead of the rebuild that a wrong turn forces later.
From $4,995 / 20-hr block (hours do not expire)A remote DBA bench for Austin teams that would rather not carry the seat in-house. Senior administrators keep watch, patch, and operate your SQL Server through the day, so no one on your side takes the 2am page.
From $395 / moWhen production locks up or slows to a crawl, you land on an engineer who has already beaten this exact failure, with a 15-minute response for Managed Services and Emergency Services clients.
From $2,500 / incidentWe hunt the queries and indexes chewing through CPU, IO, and wall-clock time, then rebuild them. Measurements go on the record before we touch anything and again once the work is done.
Moves to a current release, to Azure SQL, or to AWS RDS, run without a stop your customers would catch. Support for SQL Server 2016 ends July 14, 2026, and 2017 ends in October 2027, so we chart the move well ahead of the cutoff.
A no-cost, read-only 145-point health check across setup, backups, security, and query speed, handed back as a fix list sorted by what helps most. Run that same check on your own server any time it suits you.
HA/DR you can lean on the day a node dies. We design and tune clustering and Always On Availability Groups, then bring in log shipping, replication, and Change Data Capture (CDC) for the times only the changed rows have to travel.
Readiness work on the database behind the assistants your team wants to wire in, ChatGPT (OpenAI) and Claude (Anthropic), plus the RAG pipelines, vector search, and analytics load those tools throw at SQL Server. When reporting starts to buckle, we move the production offload, including your SSRS reports and Power BI datasets, onto Snowflake, Redshift, or whichever warehouse you already run.
"Red9 are the experts in large scale MS SQL Database environments which exceed 5,000+ concurrent connections. They have mastered the understanding of complex, heavy load TSQL transactions. When tuning, database structure, indexes, stored procedure, best practices, up-time, and smooth performance are all important, Red9 is the type of DBA company who truly knows how to keep these high standards."
"Red9 is fair and honest on how they treat both fellow team members and our internal customers. Red9 can be trusted to deliver on what they commits to deliver."
"Achieved results look amazing!"
No long discovery phase, no quiet handoff to a junior. The roadmap and the payback we expect from it hit the table before anything else.
We open by nailing down the real problem: which servers are in the picture, how the symptoms present, and what the database is on the hook to deliver for the business. We ask everything up front, well before writing a line of proposal.
The 145-point health check reads how the instance is configured, whether a backup would truly come back, where security sits exposed, and what is holding queries down, then ranks each finding by the impact it carries. Want a look before we talk? Point the same audit at your own server, free and read-only, with our self-serve Health Check.
We take you through what turned up and what the work costs, item by item. You come away with a ranked roadmap and a firm figure, and nothing waits in the fine print.
Once it makes sense to move together, we work the roadmap and put the before-and-after numbers on the table so the gain is not a matter of opinion. From there, ongoing managed services hold the server steady and keep the old problems from crawling back.
Each of these is a genuine Red9 project, followed from the first call to the last measurement. The figures are the ones the client recorded before we started and after the fix went in. Client names stay out at their request.
The problem. A physician-owned medical group with a heavy clinical query load had one statement carrying most of it. It ran about 40,000 times a day at roughly 3 seconds each, reading 228,621 pages per call. Multiplied across the day, that single query was burning tens of hours of SQL time and making clinicians wait on data they needed in front of a patient.
What we did. We captured the plan and the statistics, rewrote the query, and added a covering index matched to its filter and output columns, so the engine seeks a few rows instead of reading a quarter-million pages. We logged the numbers on both sides of the change in one sitting.
228,621 down to 4 per call, IO off the box.
The result. The clinical query now returns in about a millisecond and reads 4 pages instead of 228,621. Across roughly 40,000 calls a day, that hands the group back close to 31 hours of SQL processing daily, with no new hardware.
What the review found. The top query filtered a large clinical table with no covering index, so each of its ~40,000 daily calls scanned the table, about 228,621 reads a time.
What we changed (identifiers generalized for privacy):
-- Top clinical query scanned a large table: 228,621 reads, ~3 s per call. CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX IX_clinical_lookup_covering ON dbo.[clinical_records] (/* filter cols */) INCLUDE (/* output cols */); -- query rewritten to seek the covering index; DROP INDEX rollback provided
The rewrite plus the covering index turned the scan into a seek: reads fell from 228,621 to 4, and the call dropped from about 3 seconds to 1 millisecond.
The problem. A membership-based sports and athletics organization was moving its core database to Azure and had no read on how big the target instance needed to be. Oversize it and they would overpay every month; undersize it and a busy weekend would choke. They needed the migration validated against the real workload before go-live, with the sizing measured up front.
What we did. We replayed the production workload against the candidate Azure instance, sized it to the measured load, and watched resource use and query timings over the first six weeks. The right-sized instance absorbed the full volume with room to spare.
Handled on the right-sized instance without straining it.
The result. The migration went live on an instance sized to the workload instead of a guess. It now carries more than 120 million transactions a month at about 6.42% resource usage, leaves wide headroom for busy seasons, and saved roughly 66 minutes of SQL work a day inside six weeks, with no runaway cloud bill.
What the validation showed. A replay of production traffic against the candidate Azure instance held resource usage near 6.42% while carrying 120M+ transactions a month, which confirmed the right-sizing before go-live, well ahead of the first bill.
What we checked (identifiers generalized for privacy):
-- Replayed production workload against the candidate Azure instance. -- Measured: ~6.42% resource usage carrying 120M+ transactions / month. -- Sized the instance to the measured load, using real numbers. -- => ~93.6% headroom retained; ~66 min/day SQL time saved in 6 weeks.
Sizing to the replayed load, instead of over-provisioning, kept the instance at about 6.42% usage under a 120M-transaction month and left plenty of room for peaks.
The problem. An industrial equipment manufacturer with a heavy scheduled-job load was living with a steady trickle of failed jobs, the maintenance, backup, and index work that has to succeed for a database to stay recoverable. Failures buried real alerts in noise, and a backup that quietly does not run is the kind of gap you only find on the day you need to restore.
What we did. We took over monitoring, walked the full job schedule, and fixed the failing steps at the root instead of restarting them. We tracked the failure rate and the SQL error volume across every run.
7 failures out of 63,394 runs after the work.
The result. The job schedule now runs clean, with 7 failures in 63,394 attempts instead of dozens, and 39% fewer SQL errors clouding the picture. Backups and maintenance land the way they are supposed to, so a restore is ready on the day someone actually needs it.
What the review turned up (a plain findings list this time):
Fixing the failing steps at the root and cleaning the error noise dropped failed jobs from about 68 to 7 across 63,394 runs and cut SQL errors 39%, which put the backup and maintenance schedule back on solid ground.
Those figures came off three other teams' SQL Servers. Let us go dig into what yours is holding.
Get a Free SQL Server Assessment ➜Rather just call? Our senior DBAs take the line at 1-877-891-1870
Principal-grade SQL Server and performance experts run every engagement. No junior is cutting their teeth on your production box.
One engine since 2014, with audits of 10,000+ databases and thousands of servers in the rear-view.
Every job ends with before-and-after numbers, the kind your own team can pull and confirm.
Drop a production system at 3am and, if you hold a Managed Services or Emergency Services contract, a senior DBA is with you inside 15 minutes.
Yes. Most of our clients run this remotely, and the model works. A senior DBA stays within reach through your whole Austin workday on Central time, with 24/7/365 emergency cover past that for Managed Services and Emergency Services clients. The door stays yours: secure remote access comes in over your own VPN or bastion host on least-privilege logins that you issue and can pull whenever you want, hardened with more security on top, and every change ships as a script your team reviews before it runs.
Where each choice really nets out when a SQL Server problem drops on your desk in Austin.
| Red9 | In-house DBA hire | Generalist IT / MSP | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seniority | Only principal-level SQL Server specialists, averaging 15+ years, with no junior tier on the bench. | A single person's knowledge, with a gap every time they take leave or fall sick. | Generalists for the most part, touching SQL Server between many other systems. |
| SQL Server focus | SQL Server is all we do. | Pulled across whatever else sits on their plate. | One entry on a long list of technologies. |
| Emergency response | Round the clock, with a senior DBA on the line inside 15 minutes for Managed Services and Emergency Services clients. | Only as much as one person can hold, minus their nights and time away. | A support queue where the wait stretches across hours or days. |
| Proof | Before-and-after metrics you can reproduce on your own. | Seldom tracked, and rarely shared past the team. | Usually none to point to. |
| Cost model | Billed by scoped project, by retainer, or by the incident, and you carry no salary or benefits load. | A loaded Austin salary in the range of $150,000 to $175,000, before benefits and downtime. | Folded into a larger bill and light on real depth. |
| Ramp-up | Senior help live in days. | A recruiting and onboarding run that drags on for months. | Slow to get going, and you brief them again on every new ticket. |
Get senior SQL Server coverage live within days. Get a Free SQL Server Assessment ➜
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25+ years making SQL Servers faster.
Chief Operating Officer
Chief Revenue Officer
Every Red9 engagement is run by a senior-only DBA team averaging 15+ years of hands-on work, with a lead who stays personally answerable for the outcome.
We back Austin teams over secure remote access, across Austin, Round Rock, Cedar Park, Georgetown, Pflugerville, and down through San Marcos and Kyle. The same senior DBA is on the call whether your stack runs downtown, out along the tech corridor, or south toward Buda.
We back teams across Central Texas and throughout the state. Explore the areas we serve.
Whoever ends up on your server, hold them to these five tests.
A shop that works SQL Server and nothing else will read it deeper than an MSP spread thin over dozens of products.
Ask by name who lands on your server. A low rate tends to cover a junior tier rehearsing on live production.
Hold out for metrics you can reproduce yourself: query duration, reads, and CPU, captured before the change and after it.
Get the response-time SLA, and exactly who it covers, committed to paper before you sign.
Look for real engagements carrying real figures, even where the client name stays under wraps.
| 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 | Austin and Central Texas, plus nationwide via secure remote access |
Yes. Red9 covers Austin and the wider Central Texas area, from downtown and the tech corridor out to Round Rock, Cedar Park, and Georgetown, with senior SQL Server consultants on every job. The work itself runs over your own secure connection, which is how this market operates. For Managed Services and Emergency Services clients, a 15-minute emergency response reaches your server faster than any consultant could load a truck and drive across town.
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 ➜
It begins with a free 145-point health check. From there, managed services and remote DBA are priced from $395/mo, a 20-hour senior DBA block costs $4,995 with hours that do not expire, and 24/7 emergency response starts at $2,500 per incident. Weigh that against the loaded Austin DBA salary of $150,000 to $175,000 in the comparison above and the math tends to settle itself. Anything larger gets scoped after the health check, so you sign off on the full figure before work begins.
Seasonal load rarely hits a clinical system evenly. One or two queries usually carry most of the strain, so we capture their execution plans, rewrite the worst offenders, and add covering indexes that let the engine seek a few rows in place of scanning hundreds of thousands of pages. Every change gets logged with before-and-after timings you can rerun yourself. The tuning in case #1 above followed that exact path and reclaimed about 31 hours of SQL capacity a day.
Yes, and it is one of the most common setups we see across Austin product teams. Red9 covers the tuning, backups, security, and monitoring while your engineers keep shipping. You get senior DBA depth without adding a hire.
Distribution work never really pauses, so maintenance has to happen while orders keep flowing. We run index and integrity work online in small batches, watch blocking so a stuck receiving scan gets caught within minutes, and rehearse failover before anyone needs it. Warehouse and order queries get tuned against real shipment volume, and every change ships with a rollback script. The database keeps taking orders while we work on it.
General questions about versions, platforms, and how engagements work are answered on our SQL Server consulting page.
Give us 30 minutes. We will show you where your SQL Server is leaking speed, uptime, and money, and what it takes to close the gap. Your free SQL Server assessment lays the findings and the price in front of you first. If the numbers hold up, we take it from there.
Schedule My Call Now ➜Rather just call? Our senior DBAs take the line at 1-877-891-1870
