Expert Database Administration, Fully Managed

Expert DBA Coverage

Certified PostgreSQL and Greenplum specialists. No juniors on critical systems.

Proactive Monitoring

24/7 performance visibility with automated alerting before issues become incidents.

Patch & Lifecycle Management

Controlled upgrade paths, version management, and dependency tracking - without the chaos.

Security & Compliance

Hardening, access control, audit logging, and compliance posture - built in from day one.

Performance Tuning

Query optimisation, index strategy, vacuuming, and workload management to keep things fast.

Disaster Recovery

Tested backup strategies, HA configuration, and failover procedures - so you sleep at night.

Minimum 5 hours per week. Ideal for organisations with 1-3 database instances.

Minimum 10 hours per week. Ideal for organisations with 3-10 database instances.

Minimum 20 hours per week. Designed for organisations with 15+ databases or business-critical environments.

Significant cost reduction

Eliminate high internal staffing costs - salaries, training, recruitment, and turnover risk. Gain specialist expertise at transparent hourly rates, scaled to what you actually need.

Guaranteed uptime & stability

24/7 proactive monitoring and fast incident response ensure your critical databases stay available, even under peak load or unexpected failure.

Freed engineering capacity

When VLDB handles patching, backups, and performance monitoring, your developers get their time back - for product, not infrastructure.

Enhanced security & compliance

Continuous security patching, configuration hardening, and audit support. We help you stay compliant with GDPR, FCA requirements, and internal policy.

Database Health Assessment

We conduct a thorough evaluation of your database environment - performance, security, configuration, and infrastructure posture. You get a clear picture of where you stand before we take over.

Define SLAs & Runbooks

Together we establish transparent SLAs, incident response protocols, and escalation paths. We align with your ITIL processes, ticketing systems, and change management board.

Monitoring & Tooling Setup

We integrate our monitoring stack with your environment - or plug into your preferred tooling. Alerting, dashboards, and baseline metrics are configured before handover.

Managed Operations Begin

Your databases are under full VLDB management. Our engineers become an extension of your team - monitoring, tuning, patching, and supporting 24/7 from day one.

What is DBAaaS?

Database Administration as a Service (DBAaaS) is our fractional DBA model, a specialist team handles all aspects of your database operations - monitoring, performance tuning, patching, backups, and incident response - at a transparent hourly rate. You get expert DBA coverage without the cost and risk of in-house headcount.

How does DBAaaS benefit my organisation?

You gain access to a team of certified database specialists at a fraction of the cost of hiring. Your databases are monitored 24/7, incidents are caught before they become outages, and your internal engineers are freed from infrastructure firefighting to focus on product and business work.

Why outsource to VLDB instead of hiring in-house?

Hiring a senior DBA costs £80k–£120k/yr before benefits and training - and you're exposed to single-person risk. VLDB provides a full team of specialists covering multiple technologies at a transparent hourly rate, with no recruitment overhead or single point of failure.

Which databases do you support?

We support PostgreSQL, EnterpriseDB (EDB), SQL Server, Oracle, Teradata, Greenplum, AWS Redshift, Azure SQL, Snowflake, MySQL, and MariaDB. If you're not sure whether we cover your stack, just ask.

How quickly can you take over our databases?

Our onboarding is a single week of focused work. In that week we conduct a health assessment, define SLAs and runbooks, set up monitoring and tooling, and hand over to full managed operations. For urgent situations we can provide interim support even faster.

What does the onboarding week look like in practice?

Day 1–2: database health assessment and environment audit. Day 2–3: SLA definition, runbook creation, and alignment with your change management process. Day 3–4: monitoring stack integration and alerting configuration. Day 5: handover - your databases are under full VLDB management.

Do you support on-premise, cloud, and hybrid environments?

Yes. We manage databases wherever they live - on-premise data centres, sovereign cloud, AWS, Azure, GCP, or hybrid estates. We don't require you to migrate or change infrastructure to work with us.

What does 'proactive monitoring' mean in practice?

We continuously analyse performance metrics, query patterns, resource utilisation, replication lag, and storage trends. We detect and resolve issues - configuration drift, slow queries, tablespace pressure - before they cause incidents, rather than waiting for an alert or user complaint.

Is my data safe with VLDB?

Yes. Our engineers operate under strict access controls, with all activity fully audited. We follow least-privilege principles and support your compliance requirements including GDPR, ISO 27001, and FCA obligations. We never store your data - we simply manage access to your existing infrastructure.

Can I customise the service to suit our needs?

Absolutely. All three tiers can be scoped and adjusted. If your environment sits between tiers, or you have specific compliance, on-call, or technology requirements, we'll build a custom arrangement. Contact us and we'll scope it together.

What happens if there's a major incident?

Response priority scales with your tier - Enterprise clients get priority scheduling and weekly operational meetings, Professional clients get priority response, and Essential covers standard business hours support. We follow predefined runbooks agreed during onboarding, escalate through your nominated contacts, and provide a full post-incident report with root cause analysis.

How does pricing work?

We price by the hour, with a weekly minimum per tier: Essential is £200/hr with a 5-hour weekly minimum, Professional is £175/hr with a 10-hour weekly minimum, and Enterprise is £150/hr with a 20-hour weekly minimum. Additional hours beyond your minimum are billed at £200/£175/£130 per hour respectively. There are no hidden charges and no long-term lock-in contracts.

Can DBAaaS cover our full VLDB stack: SovereignDB, Private AI, and DBAsk?

Yes. DBAaaS is the managed service wrapper for the entire VLDB platform. If you are deploying SovereignDB as your analytics foundation, running Private AI in an isolated environment, and using DBAsk as your intelligence layer, VLDB can manage the whole stack under a single engagement. You get one specialist team, one point of accountability, and a predictable monthly fee covering every layer.

SovereignDB

We provision, configure, and manage your SovereignDB environment, a European-residency analytics platform with fixed pricing and no hyperscaler lock-in.

Private AI

We deploy and maintain your isolated Private AI infrastructure. Air-gapped, GDPR by design, with no public model exposure or data egress.

DBAsk

We run and support the DBAsk platform end to end, curating the metadata layer, managing the AI engine, and keeping the intelligence interface performing.

Your Database

Already running PostgreSQL, Greenplum, or another platform? We manage it under DBAaaS, with the full VLDB stack layered on top when you're ready.