Queries that crawl, backups nobody has actually restored, a licensing bill that climbs at every renewal? Our senior-only DBAs stand behind Seattle-area teams, pin down what is truly at the root of it, and back every fix with before-and-after numbers you can check yourself. SQL Server is all we do.
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SQL Server consulting in Seattle: the short answer
Red9 delivers senior-only SQL Server consulting, performance tuning, managed DBA services, and emergency response to companies across the Seattle metro and the wider Puget Sound region, from downtown and South Lake Union out to Bellevue, Redmond, and Tacoma. SQL Server is the one engine we work on, and each engagement starts with a free 145-point health check. Our roster runs to 120+ clients, from seed-stage startups up to the Fortune 100; Managed Services and Emergency Services clients get a production incident answered within 15 minutes, and every fix ships with numbers taken before and after the work.
Looking for a SQL Server consultant close to home in Seattle? Book your free assessment.
Seattle runs on cloud platforms, global logistics, aerospace, and regulated health data, all of it high-volume and unforgiving the moment a database slows down. From South Lake Union and downtown out to Redmond, Bellevue, Everett, and Renton, an outsized share of those workloads sits on SQL Server. Those are the systems our DBAs spend their days inside.
Seattle is a cloud and enterprise-software capital. Microsoft is headquartered in Redmond, Amazon and AWS anchor South Lake Union, and a deep bench of SaaS and platform companies fills in around them. These workloads scale hard and punish a database sized for last year's traffic, so we size and tune SQL Server to keep pace as load climbs, whether it runs on premises, on Azure, or on AWS. We have done exactly this for a B2B pricing SaaS: see the case study below.
The region moves goods at global scale. Amazon runs its e-commerce operation from Seattle, and the Port of Seattle and Port of Tacoma together form the Northwest Seaport Alliance, one of the largest container gateways in North America. The databases behind ordering, warehouse, and freight-tracking systems cannot stall during a peak, and any card-payment workload sits under PCI-DSS, so we tune them to hold their speed when volume spikes.
Aerospace is built into the metro. Boeing assembles widebodies in Everett and 737s in Renton, ringed by a dense supplier base of precision manufacturers, much of it working under ITAR export controls. The production, quality, and supply-chain databases across that supplier ring punish a poorly tuned SQL Server, and we have fixed exactly that for an ERP-driven manufacturer: see the case study below.
Seattle anchors a serious health and life-sciences economy. Fred Hutch, UW Medicine, and Seattle Children's run clinical and research data under HIPAA, next to a fast-growing biotech cluster in South Lake Union, where a slow query turns into a care or research delay. We speed up the clinical, research, and reporting databases behind that work while access stays tight and audited.
We work with businesses across the region: Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond, Tacoma, Everett, Kent, and Renton, and statewide across Washington, including Spokane, Vancouver, and Olympia, over secure remote access. The work fits your schedule, on Pacific business hours.
Principal-level direction for a Seattle team weighing a decision on architecture, performance, cost, or how the system scales. We come in while the call is still cheap to get right, ahead of the expensive rebuild that follows a wrong turn.
From $4,995 / 20-hr block (hours do not expire)A remote DBA bench for Seattle teams that would rather not carry the role on payroll. Senior administrators watch, patch, and operate your SQL Server day to day, which keeps your own people off the 2am pager.
From $395 / moWhen production locks up or goes over, you land on an engineer who has already handled this exact failure, with a 15-minute response for Managed Services and Emergency Services clients.
From $2,500 / incidentWe run down the queries and indexes eating CPU, IO, and wall-clock time, then rewrite them. We log the numbers on the way in and once more on the way out.
Moves onto a current version, onto Azure SQL, or onto AWS RDS, run without downtime your customers would catch. Extended support for SQL Server 2016 ends July 14, 2026, and 2017 follows in October 2027, so we chart the move well ahead of the cutoff.
A free, read-only 145-point health check that spans configuration, backups, security, and performance, then comes back as a fix list sorted by what hurts most. You can aim the very same check at your own server whenever you like.
HA/DR built to genuinely recover when it counts, tested well past what a runbook shows. 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 need to travel.
Readiness work for the database sitting behind the assistants your team wants to wire in, ChatGPT (OpenAI) and Claude (Anthropic), together with the RAG pipelines, vector search, and analytics load those tools drop onto SQL Server. When reporting begins to buckle, we move the production offload, SSRS reports and Power BI datasets and all, onto Snowflake, Redshift, or whatever warehouse is already in place.
"Apparently Red9 DBAs are incredibly skilled at what they do. Our DBA was pretty patient and he was good about staying in communication. He knew that we were anxious to get the problem solved and he was able to do that."
"Red9 has a good understanding of SQL Server tuning. Red9 came up to speed on SQL 2016 and had worked to incorporate new features into our processes."
"Stellar performance as always. Red9’s attention to detail is incredible, and they are very dependable and consistently performs at a very high level."
A senior DBA handles everything personally, and discovery wraps in days rather than months. The roadmap and the payback you can expect from it come first.
We open by nailing down the real problem: which servers are in play, what the symptoms actually look like, and what the database has to deliver for the business. We ask everything before we float a proposal.
The 145-point health check examines how the instance is configured, whether your backups would truly come back, where security is exposed, and what is holding queries back, then ranks every finding by impact. Curious before you talk to us? Aim that identical audit at your own server, free and read-only, using our self-serve Health Check.
We take you through what we found and what fixing it costs, item by item. You come away with a ranked roadmap and a firm number, and nothing is buried in fine print.
When working together adds up, we run the roadmap and put the before-and-after numbers on the table so the gain is measurable. After that, ongoing managed services keep the server healthy and stop the old problems from creeping back in.
Each of these is an actual Red9 project, carried through from first look to shipped fix. The figures are what the client measured before we started and after the work landed. Client names are withheld because they asked us to.
The problem. A dental products manufacturer leaned on a nightly stored procedure to close out the day's transactions before the next morning could open. Over time it had crept past 18 minutes per run, more than 1,080,000 milliseconds, and it finally stopped finishing inside its window at all, which stalled the production system and held up the whole business until it cleared.
What we did. We pulled the procedure's plan and statistics, found the filter it ran with no index behind it, and built a covering index so the engine seeks the rows it needs instead of scanning the full table on every pass.
A covering index replaced the full-table scan the job used to run every night.
The result. The overnight job now completes in under a second instead of 18-plus minutes, and it finishes its window with room to spare, so the production stall it used to trigger is gone.
What the review found. The nightly procedure filtered a large transaction table that had no index supporting its filter, so every run scanned the table end to end, more than a million reads, and the run time crept past 18 minutes until it blew through its overnight window.
What we changed (identifiers generalized for privacy):
-- Nightly close procedure scanned the full table: 18+ min (1,080,000+ ms) per run. CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX IX_daily_close_covering ON dbo.[daily_transactions] (/* filter cols */) INCLUDE (/* output cols */); -- rollback: DROP INDEX script provided
The covering index turned the scan into a seek: the overnight job dropped from more than 18 minutes to under a second, and the production stall cleared.
The problem. A B2B pricing-optimization SaaS company ran a pricing calculation on its hottest path, the one that priced a request spanning several products at once. Each run took about 565 milliseconds and burned 578 milliseconds of CPU, so under real customer load the pricing engine dragged exactly when it mattered most.
What we did. We refactored the query so it works set-based across the full list of products in a single pass instead of grinding through them one at a time, and tuned the access path behind it. We recorded the state on both sides of the change in one session.
2,168 down to 996 on the heaviest lookup in the query.
The result. The pricing query now returns in about 7 milliseconds on roughly a thirty-sixth of the CPU it used to spend, so the pricing engine holds its speed as customer traffic climbs.
What the review turned up. The multi-product pricing case was written to evaluate each product on its own, so the query did far more work than the request actually needed and leaned hard on CPU every time it ran.
What we changed (identifiers generalized for privacy):
-- Multi-product pricing case: 565 ms, 578 ms CPU per execution. -- Rewrote the per-product loop as one set-based pass over all products, -- then tuned the covering access path behind it. CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX IX_price_basis_covering ON dbo.[price_basis] (/* filter cols */) INCLUDE (/* output cols */);
The rewrite plus the access-path change cut the query from 565 ms to 7 ms and CPU from 578 ms to 16 ms per execution.
The problem. A manufacturer whose operations run on a single ERP database watched it start throwing deadlocks at a rate 2,763% above its normal baseline. A spike like that cascades into failed transactions and a stalled system fast, and the team had no early warning of it on their own.
What we did. Red9 monitoring flagged the surge as it happened, and a senior DBA was on it the same day. We traced the collisions to the queries fighting over the same rows, then reworked their indexing and how long they hold locks so sessions stop colliding under load.
A senior DBA was working the surge the day it appeared, not after an outage.
The result. Monitoring caught the surge the day it started, and with the contending queries reworked the deadlock rate came back toward its normal baseline, so the manufacturer never took the outage the spike was heading toward.
What we uncovered. A handful of queries were contending for the same rows on the busy ERP tables, and a weak plan made each one hold its locks longer than it should have, which multiplied into the deadlock surge as concurrency climbed.
What we changed (identifiers generalized for privacy):
-- Contending ERP queries held locks too long, driving a 2,763% deadlock surge. -- Reworked their indexing so they seek instead of scan, shortening lock hold time. CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX IX_erp_order_lines_covering ON dbo.[erp_order_lines] (/* filter cols */) INCLUDE (/* output cols */); -- lock order aligned across sessions to cut collisions; rollback scripts provided
With the queries seeking instead of scanning and holding locks for less time, the collisions stopped multiplying and the deadlock rate fell back toward baseline.
Every one of those numbers came off another team's SQL Server. Let us dig out what is hiding in yours.
Get a Free SQL Server Assessment ➜Want to talk it through first? Call a senior DBA on 1-877-891-1870
Principal-grade SQL Server and performance experts run every engagement. No juniors learning the trade on your production box.
A single engine, in our hands since 2014, with 10,000+ databases health-checked and thousands of servers in the rearview.
Every job ends with before-and-after numbers, the kind your own team can pull and reproduce.
Should production go dark at 3am, Managed Services and Emergency Services clients get a senior DBA within 15 minutes.
Yes. Most of our clients operate remotely, and it works out well. A senior DBA is within reach across your entire Seattle workday on Pacific time, with 24/7/365 emergency cover beyond that for Managed Services and Emergency Services clients. Access stays yours to control: secure remote connections come in over your own VPN or bastion host on least-privilege logins you create and can pull at any moment, with extra security stacked on top, and every change reaches you as a script your team reads before it runs.
Where each option really lands the day a SQL Server problem shows up on your desk in Seattle.
| Red9 | In-house DBA hire | Generalist IT / MSP | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seniority | Only principal-level SQL Server specialists, averaging 15+ years, and never a junior. | The knowledge of a single person, and every sick day or vacation opens a gap. | Generalists for the most part, dipping into SQL Server around a dozen other systems. |
| SQL Server focus | SQL Server is all we do. | Divided across everything else riding on that one hire. | Just one entry on a sprawling technology menu. |
| Emergency response | A senior DBA answering within 15 minutes, around the clock, for Managed Services and Emergency Services clients. | Only as much as one person can cover, minus their nights and time off. | A ticket queue that runs to hours or days. |
| Proof | Metrics from before and after that you are free to check yourself. | Seldom tracked, and kept in-house when it is. | Usually nothing you can check. |
| Cost model | Pay by scoped project, by retainer, or by the incident, and you carry no headcount or benefits. | A loaded Seattle salary of roughly $165,000 to $195,000, before benefits and idle time. | Folded into a larger bill and thin on depth. |
| Ramp-up | Senior hands on the problem inside a few days. | A recruit-and-onboard slog that stretches across months. | Slow to spin up, and you re-explain the context on each fresh ticket. |
Have senior SQL Server coverage in place inside a week. Get a Free SQL Server Assessment ➜
Founder & Partner
25+ years making SQL Servers faster.
Chief Operating Officer
Chief Revenue Officer
Every Red9 engagement runs on a senior-only DBA team averaging 15+ years of hands-on work, with a lead personally answerable for the outcome.
We back Seattle teams over secure remote access, across Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond, Tacoma, Everett, and Renton, and out through the wider Puget Sound region. The same senior DBA is on the call whether your stack sits in South Lake Union, on the Eastside, or down in Tacoma.
We support teams across the Puget Sound region and throughout Washington. Explore the areas we serve.
Whoever you end up hiring, hold them to these five tests.
A shop that lives in SQL Server alone will know it far deeper than an MSP stretched across dozens of products.
Ask exactly who ends up on your server. A cut-rate price usually hides a junior tier practicing on live production.
Hold out for metrics you can rebuild on your own: query duration, reads, and CPU, taken before the change and after it.
Get the response-time SLA, and exactly who it applies to, committed to paper.
Look for real projects carrying real figures, even where the client name has to stay private.
| 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 | Seattle and the Puget Sound region, plus nationwide via secure remote access |
Yes. Red9 serves Seattle and the wider Puget Sound region, from downtown and South Lake Union out to Bellevue, Redmond, and Tacoma. Remote coverage is the standard in this market, and it is how almost every Seattle client we serve already works. Secure remote access plus a 15-minute emergency response for Managed Services and Emergency Services clients puts a senior DBA on your problem long before anyone could schedule a drive to your office.
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 all begins with a free 145-point health check. From there, managed services and remote DBA start at $395/mo, a 20-hour senior DBA block is $4,995 and those hours do not expire, and 24/7 emergency response starts at $2,500 per incident. Bigger or continuing work is scoped after that check. Hold any of it against the loaded Seattle salary of roughly $165,000 to $195,000 a full-time DBA runs before benefits and idle time.
Cloud VMs punish the same waste on-premises hardware forgave. Oversized instances burn budget, undersized disks throttle IOPS, and licensing follows core count, so right-sizing pays twice. We benchmark the workload, match VM class and storage tier to what it actually needs, and tune the heaviest queries so a smaller instance carries the load. Many Seattle teams find the tuning covers its own cost in the next month's cloud bill.
Overnight jobs creep. A procedure that once ran in minutes picks up data volume year after year until it blows through its window and holds the morning hostage. We pull the plan, find the filter running with no index behind it, and build a covering index so the job seeks rows instead of scanning millions. That exact fix took the stalled nightly procedure in case #1 above from 18 minutes to under a second.
Each release ships new queries, and the slow ones hide until customer load finds them. The discipline is simple: baseline the hot path before every deploy, compare Query Store numbers after, and fix regressions while they are one sprint old. When a hot query does slip through, a set-based rewrite usually recovers it, the way the pricing calculation in case #2 above went from 565 ms to 7 ms.
For general questions on versions, platforms, and how an engagement runs, see our SQL Server consulting page.
Give us 30 minutes. We will pinpoint where your SQL Server bleeds speed, uptime, and budget, and lay out the work to set it straight. The free SQL Server assessment puts the findings and the price in your hands first. If it pencils out, we go from there.
Schedule My Call Now ➜Want to talk it through first? Call a senior DBA on 1-877-891-1870
