The Company Story

Established in 2009, the company originally offered consulting services around the complex topic of “technical software quality”, dealing mostly with overall performance as well as reliability and maintainability. Our analysis did more than point out the weaknesses; we included specific recommendations for improvements.

While presenting our solutions, we recognized that the established procedures for solving database performance problems have a fundamental flaw: although the cause of the problem is very often in the application that accesses the database, the database administrators are nonetheless supposed to fix it. Many companies waste an enormous amount of energy because of this discrepancy as their efforts tend to only ease symptoms but not correct deeper root problem.

This misunderstanding concerning roles is not limited to the culture in any one specific company. It can also be found in the technical literature. Database books for developers generally don’t cover performance at all, or superficially at best. On the other hand, books about database performance are mostly about administration—it is very difficult for developers to find relevant and useful information. Once we understood the real cause of so many companies struggling with SQL performance, we started to systematically align our services to make this topic easily accessible to developers.

As part of our Instant Coaching, we provide our know-how in a form suitable for everyday use by developers worldwide. Furthermore, the English edition of our book “SQL Performance Explained” was first available in July 2012. It gives developers a structured introduction to the performance characteristics of modern SQL databases.