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Comment by mcherm | Hacker News Reader

I think DB tuning seems like a perfect business opportunity for specialist consulting. Doing a really good job requires deep expertise but then it only needs to be repeated occasionally (if the operational profile or the data size changes significantly).

But I don't see this model much. I mostly hear of companies struggling to develop internal expertise or going without.

Why?

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I did this for years. I was a server optimisation consultant. I'd always advise my clients that increasing the specs of the hardware would probably be cheaper in the short term than hiring me to go through the various configurations with a fine toothed comb. I also promised a fixed price report on what needed to be done, as well as a fixed price quote on doing the actual work. I found that this level of transparency and honesty never failed, and the work was always approved. I'd also offer training for the internal team.

I've pretty much completely changed careers now, but I found that this model did work well. It involved a lot of constant research and occasionally a huge amount of stress, but I loved it!

> But I don't see this model much. Why?

It does exist (I'm one of them), and it's much more common on expensive databases like Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle. With free databases, it's relatively inexpensive to throw more hardware at the problem. When licensing costs $2,000 USD per CPU core or higher, there's much more incentive for companies to bring an expert in quickly to get hardware costs under control.

Yup, SQL Server performance and licensing (!) consultants came out of retirement after MS doubled the licensing costs in 2012.

Managers don't like paying for optimization consultants, but it's the easiest way to both improve current performance and scale a master.

Note that Oracle positions MySQL as a replacement for SQL Server, as "moderate-performance databases." :)

Source: DBA.

https://metrixdata360.com/pricing-series/1500-price-increase...

> I think DB tuning seems like a perfect business opportunity

I got you fam: https://ottertune.com/

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