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copied!<p>This is definitely one of those 'you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink' situations.</p> <p>My recommendation here would be to quote the DBA services as hourly, and make the rate high enough that you can outsource the work if you decide you want to. When (not if) the SQL servers start to have problems, the firm is on the hook.</p> <p>I would also recommend that you include in your quote a non-optional 2 hour database technology review once per year. This is your opportunity to say 'You spent XXX on database maintenance this year, most of which was spent fighting fires that could have been easily avoided if you had just spent XXXX/4 and hired a DBA. We care about you as a customer, and we want you to save money, so we really recommend that you commit to using a DBA to perform periodic preventative maintenance'.</p> <p>I would also recommend that you categorize any support requests as having root cause b/c of database maintenance vs other causes. This will let you put a nice pie chart in front of the customer during their annual review (which they are going to pay you to perform). It is critical to manage the perception so they don't think your code is causing the problems. You might even go so far as to share these metrics (db related issue vs non-db related issue) with them on a quarterly basis.</p> <p>Sometimes people need to experience pain before they change. The key is to not be in between the hammer and their thumb as they learn the lesson, and hourly quoted work is one way of doing this.</p> <p>As a side note, this sort of question is of great interest to a large number of developers. I'd say that this sort of thing could impact a programmer's quality of life more than any algorithm or library question ever could. Thanks for asking it!</p>

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