Hire SQL Engineers Who Read The Query Plan First
Slow Isn't Always The Database
A report that takes ninety seconds usually isn't short of hardware. It's a missing index, a query that fans out, or a schema that made sense when the table held ten thousand rows. We hire engineers who find out which before anyone buys a bigger instance.
why choose ecomia
Why These Engineers, Not A Bigger Instance
Throwing hardware at a slow database buys you a few months and a larger bill. Our engineers read the plan, find the cause and fix it, then tell you what it costs to keep it fixed.
They start with the plan
EXPLAIN before opinions. Index choices, join order and row estimates, so the fix addresses the real cost rather than the first suspect.
Schema design that ages well
Normalization where it earns its keep, denormalization where reads demand it, and constraints that stop bad data at the door instead of in a cleanup script.
Migrations without the outage
Version upgrades and platform moves run in stages, with replication, a rehearsed cutover and a way back if the numbers disagree.
Security handled as part of the work
Least privilege, encryption at rest and in transit, and audit trails your compliance team can actually read. Not a task bolted on at the end.
Services
What Our SQL Engineers Handle
Bring them in for one of these or all of them.
Relational design for growth: keys, constraints, partitioning and the tradeoffs behind each choice on MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server or Oracle.
Plan analysis, index strategy, rewriting the query that fans out, and killing the N+1 patterns your ORM generates quietly.
Legacy to modern, on premise to Amazon RDS, Google Cloud SQL or Azure SQL Database, with downtime measured in minutes rather than a weekend.
Views, materialized views and warehouse feeds behind Tableau, Power BI, Looker or Metabase, so dashboards stop timing out.
Backups you have restored at least once, replication, failover, monitoring with New Relic, Percona or Redgate, and a runbook for the bad night.
Role design, row level security where it fits, encryption, and audit logging that answers who read what and when.
Deduplication, referential integrity repair, and the constraints that stop the same mess coming back.
Built Around Your Needs
How You Bring Them In
Dedicated teams
Need a data team that stays?
Engineers and a lead who learn your schema, your load pattern and your reporting calendar, then stay with it. You own the data, they own the backlog.
Software outsourcing
Want the whole migration handled?
We scope, rehearse and run the move, then hand back documented schema and runbooks. You keep the decisions while we carry delivery.
Staff Augmentation
Short a senior SQL engineer this quarter?
One or two engineers inside your team, your sprint and your review process. Useful when a tuning backlog or an upgrade deadline lands on top of normal work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Usually not. Start with the query plan: a missing index, a bad join order, or a query returning far more rows than the report displays explains most cases. Hardware hides those problems for a few months and then you pay twice.
PostgreSQL if you want richer types, stronger constraints, window functions and extensions. MySQL if your team already runs it well and the workload is straightforward reads and writes. Your team's familiarity usually matters more than the feature list.
Close to it. Replication from the old database to the new one, a read only window measured in minutes and a rehearsed cutover keeps the outage small. Anyone promising literally zero downtime is glossing over the cutover.
Both, deliberately. ORMs are fine for straightforward reads and writes and poor at reporting queries. The rule we use is that anything performance sensitive gets hand written SQL and a plan someone has actually looked at.
Read the schema and the queries hitting it rather than the tribal knowledge. Foreign keys, indexes and slow query logs tell you what the system really does. We write that down as we go, which is often the first documentation the database has had.
Different jobs. A developer designs schema and writes queries. A DBA keeps the instance alive: backups, replication, failover, patching and access. Small teams often need a few days of DBA work a month and a developer full time.
Index changes and query rewrites are usually safe and reversible, and we prefer to prove them first on a copy with production sized data. Schema changes on large tables need a migration strategy, since a naive ALTER can lock a table for hours.
Yes. We can take a defined slice, whether that is tuning, a migration or reporting, while your team keeps the roadmap. What matters is agreeing who owns schema decisions, because two teams changing the schema independently is how integrity problems start.
They stay if they are doing real work and move if they are hiding business logic the application should own. We inventory them, find what is actually called and what has not run in a year, then decide case by case rather than in bulk.
Let’s Build What’s Next
Talk to our team about your goals
Have a project in mind or a challenge you’re looking to solve? Let’s talk about how we can help you move forward.